Re:Writing a RISC-V Emulator in Rust
by timhh on Sunday October 26, 2025 @03:34PM
(#45714588)
Those architectures are all much older than RISC-V from a time when it wasn't quite so blindingly obvious that Little Endian had won the debate.
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The fact that essentially every major ISA except x86 has support for big-endian including the two latest big-name entries (ARMv8 and RISC-V) contradicts this assertion.
Most importantly, big-endian numbers have overwhelmingly won the human factor. If I write 4567, you don't interpret it as 7 thousand 6 hundred and fifty-four. Even an "inverted big-endian" (writing the entire sequence backward rather than partially forward and partially backward like little endian) makes more sense and would be much more at home with right-to-left readers more than little endian too.