I am playing with little endian/big endian conversion and found something that a is a bit confusing but also interesting.
In first example, there is no problem using bit shift to convert byte order for type of uint32_t
. It basically cast a uint32_t
integer to an array of uint8_t
and try to access each byte and bit shift.
Example #1:
uint32_t htonl(uint32_t x)
{
uint8_t *s = (uint8_t*)&x;
return (uint32_t)(s[0] << 24 | s[1] << 16 | s[2] << 8 | s[3]);
}
However, if I try to do something similar on a uint64_t
below, the compiler throws a warning about 's[0] width is less than 56 bits` as in Example #2 below.
Example #2:
uint64_t htonl(uint64_t x)
{
uint8_t *s = (uint8_t*)&x;
return (uint64_t)(s[0] << 56 ......);
}
To make it work, I have to fetch each byte into a uint64_t
so I can do bit shift without any errors as in Example #3 below.
Example #3:
uint64_t htonll2(uint64_t x)
{
uint64_t byte1 = x & 0xff00000000000000;
uint64_t byte2 = x & 0x00ff000000000000;
uint64_t byte3 = x & 0x0000ff0000000000;
uint64_t byte4 = x & 0x000000ff00000000;
uint64_t byte5 = x & 0x00000000ff000000;
uint64_t byte6 = x & 0x0000000000ff0000;
uint64_t byte7 = x & 0x000000000000ff00;
uint64_t byte8 = x & 0x00000000000000ff;
return (uint64_t)(byte1 >> 56 | byte2 >> 40 | byte3 >> 24 | byte4 >> 8 |
byte5 << 8 | byte6 << 24 | byte7 << 40 | byte8 << 56);
}
I am a little bit confused by Example #1
and Example #2
, as far as I understand, both s[i]
is of uint8_t
size, but somehow if it only shift 32 bits or less there is no problem at all, but there is an issue when shifting like 56 bits. I am running this program on Ubuntu with GCC 8.3.0.
Does the compiler implicitly convert s[i]
into 32-bit numbers in this case? sizeof(s[0])
is 1 when I added debug messages to that.