The C23 edition of Modern C

> The storage order, the endianness, as given for my machine, is called little-endian. A system that has high-order representation digits first is called big-endian. Both orders are commonly used by modern processor types. Some processors are even able to switch between the two orders on the fly.

Calling big endian "commonly used by modern processor types" when s390x is really the only one left is a bit of a stretch ;D

(Comments about everyone's favorite niche/dead BE architecture in 3… 2… 1…)

"Modern" doesn't mean "currently widespread".

Indeed, if it meant "currently widespread" there'd be a stronger argument for Big Endian with a lot of MIPS and PPC chugging away silently. But interpreting "modern" as recent development, BE is close to gone.

Is there some end to this criticism or do you have some stake in dismissing big endian architectures?

Uh, why so serious? I called it "a bit of a stretch ;D" - there was a reason for that smiley. I'm well aware BE is alive enough to be around.

If you can't live without knowing, sure, my stake in dismissing big endian architectures is that I can't in fact dismiss BE architectures because I have users on it. And it's incredibly painful to test because while my users have such hardware, actually buying a good test platform or CI system is close to impossible. (It ended up being Freescale T4240-QDS devkits off eBay. Not a good sign when the best system you can get is from a company that doesn't exist anymore.)

And at some point it's a question about network protocols/encodings being designed to a "network byte order" determined in the 80s to be big endian. When almost everything is LE, maybe new protocols should just stick with LE as well.