Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-07-24 04:07:37
Published on: 2013-07-24T04:07:37+00:00
In an email conversation in 2013, Wendell asked if there was a substantial barrier to endian independence in the Bitcoin codebase. The response stated that there wasn't really a barrier to it and that fixing the memory order to and from the wire is a typical endianness fix. However, almost everything Bitcoin sends and receives is an authenticated data structure which makes simply swizzling the byte order on input not enough. Sometimes the data needs to be hashed for authentication and can't be in memory order for that. Luke had attempted to fix this issue previously but it wasn't enough yet. It seems like fixing this issue would be quite an undertaking and without a significant reason to do so, no real progress in fixing it is happening.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:21:44.889918+00:00