[Development] Why qrc's metadatas is the big endian?

[Thiago Macieira]

On Monday, 23 May 2022 19:51:15 PDT 弓 长 wrote:
> Hi, I don't find one document of reason about the design, I found this
> patch: https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/177353 , apparently
> it was big endian before that.
> The reality is that little endian is more
> commonly used in local environments, so I wonder why we don't default to
> little endian?

Backwards compatibility. If you have a time machine and can send us a message 
in the mid-1990s, we could make a change.

It's possible to change some of those fields by bumping the version number, 
but it would add code, not reduce. That is, it would make things more complex, 
not less. I don't think it's worth it. Byte-swapping is pretty fast.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Cloud Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering