Finding endian-ness programmatically at compile-time using C++11

Question

I have referred many questions in SO on this topic, but couldn't find any solution so far. One natural solution was mentioned here: Determining endianness at compile time.
However, the related problems mentioned in the comments & the same answer.

With some modifications, I am able to compile a similar solution with g++ & clang++ (-std=c++11) without any warning.

static_assert(sizeof(char) == 1, "sizeof(char) != 1");
union U1
{
  int i;
  char c[sizeof(int)];
};  
union U2
{ 
  char c[sizeof(int)];
  int i;
};  

constexpr U1 u1 = {1};
constexpr U2 u2 = {{1}};
constexpr bool IsLittleEndian ()
{ 
  return u1.i == u2.c[0];  // ignore different type comparison
}   

static_assert(IsLittleEndian(), "The machine is BIG endian");

Demo.

Can this be considered a deterministic method to decide the endian-ness or does it miss type-punning or something else?

Answer 1

Since C++20 you can use std::endian from the <type_traits> header:

#include <type_traits>

int main()
{
    static_assert(std::endian::native==std::endian::big,
                  "Not a big endian platform!");
}

See it live