Sorting and ART indices should be supported on Big-endian platforms

[barracuda156]

What happens?

Sorting and ART indices are broken in duckdp for Big-endian platforms. The codebase has the following:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aduckdb%2Fduckdb+Radix%3A%3AIsLittleEndian%28%29&type=code

P. S. This issue is not specific to any OS. So while I tested it on macOS, it affects any Unix-like OS just as well.

To Reproduce

The issue was discovered when running tests for duckplyr in R, but the cause of the problem is duckdb itself.

OS:

macOS / PowerPC

DuckDB Version:

0.9.1

DuckDB Client:

R

Full Name:

Sergey Fedorov

Affiliation:

Soochow University

Have you tried this on the latest main branch?

I have tested with a main build

Have you tried the steps to reproduce? Do they include all relevant data and configuration? Does the issue you report still appear there?

• Yes, I have

[szarnyasg]

Hello @barracuda156 unfortunately we do not support big-endian architectures (see our support policy). Of course, contributions are welcome.

[szarnyasg]

Hi @barracuda156, we discussed this internally and concluded that we do not have the capacity to support Big-endian platforms. This is not necessarily a matter of implementation efforts, rather the related infrastructure and testing which would require a substantial effort.

Patches are welcome but we are unable to commit to supporting Big-endian platforms in the long run.

[barracuda156]

@szarnyasg If it is a matter of running a test-suite (or/and some alternative more specific tests) and submitting results to verify nothing got broken, I could commit to doing that regularly as required.

Perhaps an explicit warning can be displayed to a user that the upstream does not guarantee full support for Big-endian platforms (or even that tickets are not accepted).

(I am replying in a context of discussing the issue, there is no implication that anyone should do this.)