Docs are vague and misleading about endianness

[Lijosu]

Your Godot version: Stable

Issue description: Endianness behaviour is not properly documented in most articles in the documentation.

URL to the documentation page:

N/A. This affects all articles which mention endianness. Whether or not they are correct is a coin-flip. Source here.

[Mickeon]

You should probably go into more detail.

Regardless, this may have been fixed by godotengine/godot#105178

[Lijosu]

I am not interested in investing anymore time than I already have with this issue and I was encouraged to open the issue by others.

For the sake of clarity, though, I will give some crude examples:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_packedbytearray.html#class-packedbytearray-method-get-string-from-utf32

PackedByteArray.get_string_from_utf32() says “System endianness is assumed.” This implies to the reader that the endianness may change depending on the system, but in actuality, Godot does not officially support any big endian systems and the documentation wants the developer to assume that the game will be ran in little endian. Clarification is needed.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_fileaccess.html#class-fileaccess-property-big-endian

FileAccess.big_endian is dependant on CPU endianness, and does not necessarily change the encoding method to big endian. In all practical cases, it will, but the documentation is misleading. This should be fixed by the merge linked above. I do not know if it actually fully does.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/io/binary_serialization_api.html

Here it is said that “all values are little-endian encoded”. This is technically true, but leaves out that it may not reflect the actual behaviour of the engine. If there is code that would technically change the encoding if godot was forked to support big endian for some strange reason, this would need changing.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_streampeer.html#class-streampeer-property-big-endian

StreamPeer.big_endian may be a similar situation to FileAccess, unless its encoding methods are absolute and unaffected by the system. If the latter is true, then this needs to be clarified.

Please take note that these are only the examples I am aware of (hence why I did not provide any links in the op). I cannot trawl through every article in the docs to find potential problems, and there may be many more of them.