Endianness

Suppose you have an integer stored in memory with the value 169552957, or 0x0A1B2C3D in hexadecimal. Depending on the archetecture of your system, the actual ordering of these bytes making up this integer can be different. This difference is the “endianness” of the data in memory.

Big-endian:

Bytes are stored with the most significant bit first.

0A1B2C3D

+----+----+----+----+
| 0A | 1B | 2C | 3D |
+----+----+----+----+

Memory address increasing ---->

Little-endian:

Bytes are stored with the most significant bit last.

0A1B2C3D

+----+----+----+----+
| 3D | 2C | 1B | 0A |
+----+----+----+----+

Memory address increasing ---->

Another example:

Imagine I was storing the number 5 in binary. This could be different in memory depending on its endianness.

5 in binary is 101. In a 32-bit integer, it would be padded with zeros like this:

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000101

(The spaces are for your readability, but in reality there are no gaps in a computer’s memory.)

Once represented in memory, it will look like this:

Big-endian:
00000000 00000000 00000000 00000101


Little-endian:
00000101 00000000 00000000 00000000

Notice how the bytes in the little-endian representation are reversed. They would have the same size and location in memory, but internally, the bytes are arranged differently.

If there were two integers, side-by-side in memory, little-endian does not mean that the entire block of memory is reversed. It means that specific pieces of data within memory are reversed. Look, I know it’s weird, but I didn’t make this up. Check out this example:

Storing the integer '5' followed by the integer '69' (nice) in memory:

Big-endian:
00000000 00000000 00000000 00000101 00000000 00000000 00000000 01000101
|               '5'               | |               '69'              |

Little-endian:
00000101 00000000 00000000 00000000 01000101 00000000 00000000 00000000
|               '5'               | |               '69'              |