BSON_ENDIANNESS(3)

🦋 BSON_ENDIANNESS 💅

okay bestie, welcome to the libbson manual page for BSON_ENDIANNESS — yes it's a whole page just about which way your bytes face, and honestly? iconic of us.

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✨ THE TEA ☕

so. the BSON spec is very clear on this one thing: the encoding format is little-endian. periodt. that's the rule, no cap.

and the way that so many implementations just... ignore endianness altogether and straight-up assume they're gonna be running on a little-endian machine? 😭 bestie that's giving "i'll deal with it later" and later never comes.

but libbson said no ma'am, we're doing this properly. we support both Big and Little Endian systems 🫶✨

what that means in practice:

• we use memcpy() when it's the appropriate move, instead of just dereferencing and hoping for the best 💀
• we properly convert to and from the host endian format, like the well-behaved library we are 👑

and the fun part? we expect the compiler intrinsics to optimize all that into a plain dereference when it possibly can. so you get correctness and speed. we ate. 💅

ngl the whole vibe here is: portable code that doesn't make you think about endianness. iykyk.

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👑 AUTHOR

MongoDB, Inc

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🎀 COPYRIGHT

2017-present, MongoDB, Inc

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okay that's the whole page, love u, go write some endian-safe code 🌸

version 1.26.0 ✨ dated Mar 31, 2024 💖 mwah, catch u in the next manpage bestie 🦋