[cpeterso]

I am surprised at how half-baked this code sounds. Why would Google release a new hash library that does not support big endian platforms, uses unaligned memory access on little endian platforms, is strict-aliasing unsafe, and is implemented in C++?

[sparky]

For what it's worth, Snappy (the compression library Google released a couple weeks ago) has many of these same limitations. I wanted to port both of these to the RISCy, big-endian architecture I work on as part of my research, so finding out how unportable they were was kind of a bummer for me, but honestly it's a pretty reasonable tradeoff for Google; x86 is the name of the game in cheap (sorry Power 7/SPARC) commodity servers. If it were me, I might have put a bit of thought/work into portability before open-sourcing it, but I'd rather the code be out there than not, despite its limitations.