JavaScript Endian Encoding?

Question

A response on SO got me thinking, does JavaScript guarantee a certain endian encoding across OSs and browsers?

Or put another way are bitwise shifts on integers \"safe\"

Answer 1

Some of these answers are dated, because endianness can be relevant when using typed arrays! Consider:

var arr32 = new Uint32Array(1);
var arr8 = new Uint8Array(arr32.buffer);
arr32[0] = 255;
console.log(arr8[0], arr8[1], arr8[2], arr8[3]);

When I run this in Chrome's console, it yields 255 0 0 0, indicating that my machine is little-endian. However, typed arrays use the system endianness by default, so you might see 0 0 0 255 instead if your machine is big-endian.