[jira] [Created] (ARROW-245) [Format] Clarify Arrow's relationship with big endian platforms

["Wes McKinney (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Wes McKinney created ARROW-245:
----------------------------------

             Summary: [Format] Clarify Arrow's relationship with big endian platforms
                 Key: ARROW-245
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-245
             Project: Apache Arrow
          Issue Type: Improvement
          Components: Format
            Reporter: Wes McKinney


Per August 2016 mailing list question re: big endian platforms, we have in the format document:

https://github.com/apache/arrow/blob/master/format/Layout.md#byte-order-endianness

We should clarify that this does not mean that Arrow cannot be used on big endian platforms, but rather that the canonical or "in-flight" memory representation (for IPC or memory sharing of any kind) is little-endian, so big endian systems would need to byte swap big endian integers if they intend to expose memory to any other system using Arrow. 



--
This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA
(v6.3.4#6332)