I’m writing a client and a server for a realtime offshore simulator, and, as I have to send a lot of data through a socket, I’m using binary data to maximize the amount of data I can send. I already know about integers endianness, and how to use htonl and ntohl to circumvent endianness issues, but my application, as almost all simulation software, deals with a lot of floats.
My question is: Is there some issue of endianness when dealing with binary formats of floating point numbers? I know that all the machines where my code will run use IEEE implementation of floating points, but is there some endianness issue when dealing with floats?
Since I only have access to machines with the same endian, I cannot test this by myself. So, I’ll be glad if someone can help me with this.
Yes, floating point can be endianess dependent. See Converting float values from big endian to little endian for info, be sure to read the comments.