Endianness

Definitions

1. The byte order used to store multi-byte values in memory. Big-endian stores the most significant byte first (like reading left-to-right); little-endian stores the least significant byte first. x86/ARM are little-endian; network protocols (TCP/IP) use big-endian ('network byte order'). Mismatched endianness causes subtle data corruption when systems exchange binary data.

   In plain English: Whether a computer stores numbers with the big end or little end first -- a source of bugs when systems with different byte orders talk to each other.

   Example: "The integer 0x01020304 is stored as 01 02 03 04 in big-endian but 04 03 02 01 in little-endian -- convert with htonl() before sending over the network."

Related Terms

• Service Mesh
• ABI
• Allocator
• Architecture
• C Interop
• Client
• Domain
• Binary Protocol