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> There are effectively no modern big endian CPUs.

POWER9, Power10 and s390x/Telum/etc. all say hi. The first two in particular have a little endian mode and most Linuces run them little, but they all can run big, and on z/OS, AIX and IBM i, must do so.

I imagine you'll say effectively no one cares about them, but they do exist, are used in shipping systems you can buy today, and are fully supported.

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Yeah those are a teeny tiny fraction of CPUs on the market. Little Endian should be the default and the rare big endian CPU gets to run the slow path.

Almost no code anyone here will write will run on those chips. It’s not something almost any programmer needs to worry about. And those that do can easily add support where it’s necessary.

The point is that big endian is an extreme outlier.

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