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Re:Big-Endian “is effectively dead” by davtbaum on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @08:00AM (#9451569)
Even though the bytecode is being executed on a VM, the VM itself has been ported to the architecture, which has a native endianness. Byte order in the dex that matches the host OS's will likely result in a performance gain as the VM can cast more efficiently.
Re:Big-Endian “is effectively dead” by JosephRedfern on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @08:18AM (#9451647)
That's true - do you suppose that this flag might be used if an app developer was targeting a specific CPU architecture, then?

I guess it could be argued that if you're that concerned about performance and know your target architecture, that it might be worth going native rather than running on a VM.

Re:Big-Endian “is effectively dead” by yincrash on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @09:12AM (#9451967)
This is just a guess, but I think the odex pass on dalvik switches the endianness to the architecture's native.