Comment by IshKebab
3 months ago
I'm not sure I've ever seen that actually come in to play. Little Endian is obviously the best Endian, but I don't think that argument really makes sense.
The most obvious argument is that little Endian is clearly the most natural order - the only reason to use Big Endian is to match the stupid human history of mixing LTR text with RTL numbers.
I've seen one real technical reason to prefer little endian (can't remember what it was tbh but it was fairly niche) and I've never seen any technical reasons to prefer big endian ("it's easier to read in a hex editor" doesn't count).
It depends on the application. Big Endian is pretty good for networking and sorting. If you store the address in Big Endian, you can start doing streaming prefix matching, because the most significant address byte is arriving first. When you consider how many routers and switches a packet has to cross, any buffering or Endian conversion is going to increase latency.