the resolution of Austin Group issue #162 adds endian.h as a standard
header for future versions of the standard, making it no longer
acceptable for some of the functionality to be hidden behind
_BSD_SOURCE or _GNU_SOURCE. the definitions of the [lb]etoh{16,32,64}
function-like macros are kept conditional since they are alternate
names which the standard did not adopt.
this change is motivated by the intersection of several factors.
presently, despite being a nonstandard header, endian.h is exposing
the unprefixed byte order macros and functions only if _BSD_SOURCE or
_GNU_SOURCE is defined. this is to accommodate use of endian.h from
other headers, including bits headers, which need to define structure
layout in terms of endianness. with time64 switch-over, even more
headers will need to do this.
at the same time, the resolution of Austin Group issue 162 makes
endian.h a standard header for POSIX-future, requiring that it expose
the unprefixed macros and the functions even in standards-conforming
profiles. changes to meet this new requirement would break existing
internal usage of endian.h by causing it to violate namespace where
it's used.
instead, have the arch's alltypes.h define __BYTE_ORDER, either as a
fixed constant or depending on the right arch-specific predefined
macros for determining endianness. explicit literals 1234 and 4321 are
used instead of __LITTLE_ENDIAN and __BIG_ENDIAN so that there's no
danger of getting the wrong result if a macro is undefined and
implicitly evaluates to 0 at the preprocessor level.
the powerpc (32-bit) bits/endian.h being removed had logic for varying
endianness, but our powerpc arch has never supported that and has
always been big-endian-only. this logic is not carried over to the new
__BYTE_ORDER definition in alltypes.h.
the old behavior of exposing nothing except plain ISO C can be
obtained by defining __STRICT_ANSI__ or using a compiler option (such
as -std=c99) that predefines it. the new default featureset is POSIX
with XSI plus _BSD_SOURCE. any explicit feature test macros will
inhibit the default.
installation docs have also been updated to reflect this change.
while musl itself requires a c99 compiler, some applications insist on
being compiled with c89 compilers, and use of "inline" in the headers
was breaking them. much of this had been avoided already by just
skipping the inline keyword in pre-c99 compilers or modes, but this
new unified solution is cleaner and may/should result in better code
generation in the default gcc configuration.
this only works with gcc 4.6 and later, but it allows us to support
non-default endianness on archs like arm, mips, ppc, etc. that can do
both without having separate header sets for both variants, and it
saves one #include even on fixed-endianness archs like x86.
Rich Felker