[erlang-patches] Float endianness in 15B

[Michael Sperber]

On certain ARM machines, there's a problem with float endianness, which
has been reported many times before.  Symptons:

io_lib:write(1.0).
"0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000005299808824"

The problem is *not* that the ARM is not using IEEE 754, as is inferred
here:

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2008-October/039148.html

The ARM uses IEEE 754, but the two 32-bit words in the FP
representation are swapped wrt. Erlang's assumptions.

The fix to the source code is very simple, but the associated autoconf
hackery is a bit more extensive.

Such a fix is here:

git fetch git://github.com/bjorng/otp.git double_middle_endian
https://github.com/mikesperber/otp/compare/double_middle_endian
https://github.com/mikesperber/otp/compare/double_middle_endian.patch

(This is the first time I'm submitting a fix to Erlang, and I needed our
resident git ninja to help me set up, so I hope you'll forgive me if I
did something wrong - let me know.)

-- 
Regards,
Mike