On: Setting the clock ahead to see what breaks

[patrec]

Ah hackernews -- where someone confidently decries a timestamp format designed by the world's most accomplished applied cryptographer as "bizarre" and "big-endian(!)".

Did sorting ever occur to you?

[anonymoushn → patrec]

Do the CPUs you use typically not have instructions for comparing little endian 64-bit integers?

[patrec → anonymoushn]

It can be convenient to be able to just sort as an opaque byte string.

[messe → anonymoushn]

On embedded systems? No.

[anonymoushn → messe]

Are they big endian or little endian? If they are little endian, is it cheaper to perform 8 1-byte compares, 4 2-byte compares, or 2 4-byte compares?