It might sound outrageous but I guard against this sort of thing. When I write utility code in C++ I generally include various static asserts about basic platform assumptions.

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classichasclass an hour ago | parent | next [-]

So do I. I don't find that outrageous at all. Anyone trying to do the port to something unusual would appreciate the warning.

Granted, I still work on a fair number of big endian systems even though my daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon) are little.

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peyton an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is much-appreciated. I’m hardly a Richard Stallman, but finding little incompatibilities after-the-fact is pretty irritating.

	▲	eesmith an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Take a look at https://www.kermitproject.org/ckupdates.html . These quotes come from the last few years: > [fixes] specific to VMS (a.k.a. OpenVMS), > For conformity with DECSYSTEM-20 Kermit ... > running on a real Sun3, compiled with a non-ANSII compiler (Sun cc 1.22) > this is fatal in HP-UX 10 with the bundled compiler > OpenWatcom 1.9 compiler > OS/2 builds > making sure that all functions are declared in both ANSI format and K&R format (so C-Kermit can built on both new and old computers) Oooooh! A clang complaint: 'Clang also complains about perfectly legal compound IF statements and/or complex IF conditions, and wants to have parens and/or brackets galore added for clarity. These statements were written by programmers who understood the rules of precedence of arithmetic and logical operators, and the code has been working correctly for decades.'

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eesmith an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There's platform and there's platform. I assume a POSIX platform, so I don't need to check for CHAR_BIT. My code won't work on some DSP with 64-bit chars, and I don't care enough to write that check.

Many of the tests I did back in the 1990s seem pointless now. Do you have checks for non-IEEE 754 math?