Is there any BigEndian hardware out there?

Question

I consider throwing out code that handles the big endian case from a library and instead simply throw an expception during initialization if the platform is not little endian. I cannot imagine that there is any big endian hardware if we restrict to

• typical server hardware for any web site hosted
• servers according to the open compute project spec
• all common mobile devices

Did anybody lately encounter a Big Endian machine or device that does not belong to the dinnosaur park?

Answer 1

Windows only supports little-endian processors ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/07/426334.aspx ) however it seems all of the platforms that matter (so-to-speak) are either little-endian already (x86, AMD64) or support little-endian mode (ARM, POWER/PowerPC, Itanium, etc).

While there are exclusively big-endian hardware platforms, they're increasingly rare and obscure - however if the cost of maintaining BE/LE-compatible code isn't too much trouble then I think it's worthwhile to keep it: I assume that it's only a matter of performing conversion in the entrypoints and output calls of your code, internally you shouldn't need to do anything.