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I understand what the difference between the two are. Looking at the entry in Wikipedia it seems like litte-endian format is gaining ground and this is not as much of an issue as it used to be.
HP-UX on Itanium is the only newer processor that is using big-endian format. Most others are using little-endian, which is an indication that industry is standardizing on this. Is this true? Am I missing something? Do any of these differences exist for mobile OS like iOS and Android?
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Most UNIX machines are big endian. Whereas most PCs are little endian machines. Integers (either two-byte or four-byte) are also said to be either network byte ordered, or host byte ordered. Network byte ordering is big endian and host byte ordered is little endian.
Solely big-endian architectures include the IBM z/Architecture and OpenRISC. Some instruction set architectures are "bi-endian" and allow running software of either endianness; these include Power ISA, SPARC, ARM AArch64, C-Sky, and RISC-V.
Little and big endian are two ways of storing multibyte data-types ( int, float, etc). In little endian machines, last byte of binary representation of the multibyte data-type is stored first. On the other hand, in big endian machines, first byte of binary representation of the multibyte data-type is stored first.
Little Endian − In this scheme, low-order byte is stored on the starting address (A) and high-order byte is stored on the next address (A + 1). Big Endian − In this scheme, high-order byte is stored on the starting address (A) and low-order byte is stored on the next address (A + 1).
The ARM architecture runs both little & big endianess, but the Android, iOS 6, and Windows Phone platforms run little endian. 95% of modern desktop computers are little-endian.
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