[Info-vax] Attn VSI employees: Viable full system Itanium emulator for VMS ?

[John Dallman]

In article <620fb1f4$0$697$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>, arne at vajhoej.dk
(Arne Vajhøj) wrote:

> John Dallman wrote:
> > What makes big-endian attractive to end-user organisations?
> Maybe the price tag for verifying that all code will work when
> compiled on a little endian platform and writing conversion
> programs for all binary data files.

Yup, brain was not working well yesterday. Traces the paths:

VAX was LE; Alpha was either-endian, VMS ran LE; Itanium was
either-endian, VMS ran LE; x86-64 is LE. 

PA-RISC was BE; Itanium was either-endian, HP-UX ran BE; there is no
thriving BE architecture to replace Itanium for HP-UX. POWER or IBM z are
the nearest things, and HPE seem unlikely to go to the trouble, since
they're doing well with x86-64 Linux. 

Because I worked through this a year ago, ARM is architecturally
either-endian, but many implementations have fixed endianness. Apple's
fast ARMs are LE only. BE ARM Linux is generally confined to embedded
versions in network switches, where having "network order" as the native
addressing lets vendors use less powerful and cheaper ARMs.

RISC-V is strictly little-endian. 

John