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Asked: 2026-05-15T08:26:22+00:00

I have a function which writes a 32-bit value to a buffer, and a

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I have a function which writes a 32-bit value to a buffer, and a uint64_t on the stack. Is the following code a sane way to store it?

uint64_t size = 0;
// ...
getBytes((uint32_t*)&size+0x1);

I’m assuming that this would be the canonical, safe style:

uint64_t size = 0;
// ...
uint32_t smallSize;
getBytes(&smallSize);
size = smallSize;
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    No. It works correctly only on big-endian machines. And assuming a particular byte order – without even checking it first – is not sane.

    Even if you are sure that your program runs only on big-endian machines right now, you’ll never know whether it might have to run on a little-endian machine in the future. (I’m writing this on a computer made by a company which used big-endian processors for decades, then switched to little-endian processors a couple years ago, and is now also quite successful with bi-endian processors in certain devices ;-))

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