Big-endian is the canonical form for storage and the wire because back when the Internet was designed most "pro" machines were big-endian: Sparc, old MIPS, old PPC, DEC Alpha, etc. All these are dead or dying now.
It's easy enough to deal with BE files and protocols by just swapping bytes. I'm referring to hardware architectures. Are there still any big-endian chips out there? Does it still make sense to support big-endian chips in new code as long as that code is never intended for embedded or very old systems?
It's easy enough to deal with BE files and protocols by just swapping bytes. I'm referring to hardware architectures. Are there still any big-endian chips out there? Does it still make sense to support big-endian chips in new code as long as that code is never intended for embedded or very old systems?