Alieniloquent

So I have this project, and it compiles for the Mac on both PPC and i386 architectures. Naturally, I have unit tests for this project.

One of the things that I’ve had to write for this is a simple SOCKS5 implementation (because of issues with Apple’s implementation). As part of this I had to do some manipulation of a port number and get the high and low bytes.

I’ve done this sort of thing before. That’s what htons and friends are for. So naturally, I went ahead and put this in where I thought it mattered and went on my merry way. On my ppc powerbook, my tests all passed.

Yesterday, when I ran the unit tests on my intel mac for the first time, I discovered that a test failed. It was failing because of some byte-order problem. After troubleshooting it, I narrowed it down to the htons calls. It turns out I did not need them.

See the thing is, on a ppc, things are already in network byte-order so htons does absolutely nothing. However, on i386 host byte-order is different from network byte-order. So the reason it worked on ppc was that it was essentially as if I hadn’t done it.

It turns out that the particular thing I was doing didn’t need the conversion to work correctly. I removed it, and everything worked peachy on both machines.