Is BC worth the image format switch?

Stephen Pair spair at advantive.com
Wed May 1 13:23:35 UTC 2002


> Stephen,
> 
> > > We could even convert all bitmaps to little-endian, since
> > > only Mac uses big-endian and we know that nobody important 
> > > uses Macs. 
> > 
> > Shouldn't we support both endians?
> 
> We do. Or how else would the system work?! The issue is not 
> about _bitmaps_ (those are fine whatever platform you're on) 
> but about the interpretation of what _pixels_ are where in 
> any given Form. So it's about forms not bitmaps.

Yes of course...by bitmap, I think Tim meant "bitmaps that get
displayed" (or Form).

> > If an image opens with big-endian bitmaps on
> > a little endian machines, couldn't we automatically correct them on 
> > startup? Sure it will take time, but if startup time is important, 
> > just save your image and the bitmaps get saved in the native 
> > endianness.  I suppose you might need a class for each endianness 
> > (LittleEndianBitmap, BigEndianBitmap).
> 
> Again, this issue is not about bitmaps. It's about forms 
> which do already include information about their 'supposed' 
> endianness. And yes you could do what you're describing (and 
> even do so in a pretty fast way if you look at 
> Form>>unhibernate). It just needs to be figured out if it's 
> worth the effort or not.

It doesn't seem like it should be a huge effort (especially if little
and big endianness are already accomodated by Form).  And for those
multi-media apps, every little bit of performance improvement helps.

- Stephen




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