big-endian

Optimizing for little-endian makes sense, but it would be nice if they produced consistent answers on big-endian CPUs.

C compiles to 8051 with 24-bit big-endian pointers, and the various PICs have odd instruction-word sizes like 14 bits).

To use a computing analogy, the fact that most networks are big-endian doesn't mean that there is something inherent about big-endian layout; it simply reflects the neoteny of networking (when most of the old time machines were big endian).

The fact that the Roman numeral system that it replaced was also big-endian was likely an influence.

On a big-endian system, the high order byte of the timestamp would be modified, which would probably be too obvious.

Thus, on big-endian machines, you're overwriting a zero (high order byte of a non-huge integer) with a zero, so no harm done, and the bug is masked.

All you are pointing out is that mixing little-endian and big-endian may cause trouble.

Probably all that is required is doing endian swaps in read_u64()/etc on big-endian.

Why on earth would you ever want to _return_ to big-endian?

The original idea was that on big-endian machines, the resulting.odex would be endian-swapped compared to the original.dex, and this field would provide a reasonably-blatant indication.

Well for starters, ARM has runtime-selectable endianness, so if Apple had felt any reason to do so, they would have used a big-endian ABI by now.

My hopes for a return to big-endian are dashed.

The big argument was that if you converted things into big-endian form on the network, then a little-endian processor had to convert to send and convert to receive, but a big-endian processor got a free pass without "painful" conversion steps.

Not because of some technically proven deficiency in the idea of allowing big-endian machines, but because "we don't want to." I can only imagine if such logic had been applied to other parts of the Web.

"Left" and "right" can go either way, depending on which kind of diagram you draw, even on big-endian machines, so those words always end up ambiguous.