Compatibility Basics

By: Jeremy W. Sherman. Published: . Categories: c cross-platform pitfalls.

Supporting multiple platforms – “platform” being the ramshackle combination of languages, libraries, OS, hardware, etc., that your code depends on to run – is a burden.

But you’ve no choice once you push data out of your application and off into the wide wide world. Any data you write to disk or network is potentially going to end up being read back on another platform. It could be something wildly different – data sent from an iPhone 5 to a little-endian MIPS machine on someone’s desktop halfway across the world – or it could be something less drastic, like an old file written to disk by version 1 of your application and then read back several OS and application upgrades later.

There are techniques you can adopt to mitigate problems, but many applications will founder on far simpler issues well before they reach that level of sophistication.

You likely take for granted:

But all these assumptions are a trap:

/** Swaps bytes, and so swaps big/little endianness.
 *  (Hope your platform doesn't use packed binary-coded decimal!) */
uint16_t byteswap16(uint16_t in) {
{
    uint16_t out = 0;
    for (size_t i = 0, e = sizeof(in); i < e; ++i) {
        uint16_t shifted_right = (in >> (i * CHAR_BIT));
        uint16_t byte_i = shifted_right & 0xFF;
        uint16_t mirrored = (byte_i << ((e - (i + 1)) * CHAR_BIT));
        out |= mirrored;
    }
    return out;
}

But endianness is also an issue for binary data files, which includes many applications’ document formats. If you just spit raw bytes to disk, in whatever order you find them in-memory, then you’ll run into trouble when an app in a different endian environment slurps that file in.

All of these traps are straightforward to avoid once you’re aware of them, but are a royal pain to redress after you’ve built a mountain of code atop platform-naïve foundations.

Unless you’ve got these right, don’t even bother worrying about the more obvious (and #ifdef-multiplying) differences between platforms.