Just curious, what is your specific interest in BE?

We used to, I feel, have higher quality software because it was tested out on a bunch of different platforms. One of the big things we've lost is testing for endianness related bugs, which sometimes catches other bugs too.

There's other categories that we catch less often now too, like assumptions about byte alignment, buffer sizes, and so on.

Cross-platform development is a lost art. It made you think about your program a lot more before you hit the keyboard.

The people at AtariSoft and Infocom were wizards in that regard. People today just lean on Electron or something similar.

Imagine releasing the same game, written in assembler, for Atari, Commodore, Intellivision, BBC, Apple, IBM, TI, TRS-80, and Coleco machines.

Infocom had it a little easier, as it only had to write parsers for each platform. But then, it also released its games for freaking PDP-11 machines at least into the end of the 80's.

>It made you think about your program a lot more before you hit the keyboard.

And as I have ranted about it for a whole decade, This was pushed by Google / Facebook or Silicon Valley. Thinking long and hard before you hit the keyboard are wrong in modern software development.

Yup. OpenBSD has pointed out a number of times the utility of the SPARC build platform to ferret out things like bad alignment assumptions.

Perhaps someone will modify RISC-V or some such to have variable alignment rules, switchable endianness, etc. as a debugging platform.

But there's a limit...I doubt we'll see, for example, anyone offering a ones compliment machine, even though it might reveal some interesting bugs.