IMHO, it's a bug if it's not specified. If your code looks portable and compiles on a big endian machine and fails, that's a bug. You should really at least fail compilation.
I don't care about non-8-bit bytes either, and a bunch of other things, but having to deliberate add checks to "say no" just because someone might decide to use your code on some odd machine is a pure waste of time and even encourages the sort of lock-in and "environment nitpicking" that proprietary software vendors love.
As the saying goes, common sense is unfortunately not so common these days.
> As the saying goes, common sense is unfortunately not so common these days.
Ignoring the existence of big-endian computers is not really common sense. They DO exist. And it'd be very useful to test in both little and big-endian architectures. I cover the endianness tests by running my TravisCI pipelines on amd64 and s390x, but both run on Linux, which is sub-optimal. I should probably add AIX so that I'm not implying the OS is Linux and importing linuxisms into the code when it should be more portable than that.
I don't care about non-8-bit bytes either, and a bunch of other things, but having to deliberate add checks to "say no" just because someone might decide to use your code on some odd machine is a pure waste of time and even encourages the sort of lock-in and "environment nitpicking" that proprietary software vendors love.
As the saying goes, common sense is unfortunately not so common these days.