Comment by ephaeton

yeah, machines of different endianness, and, ideally, different alignment requirements. Always wanted to get an alpha, as well. Had hpux / hp300 ?, sparc, sparc64, 386, x86_64, maybe another arch. This was in 2005'ish, mind you. Idea was to write code that would portably work on linux and netbsd on at least said architectures, ideally more.