[cliffbean]

Little-endian is generally better for compilers, to the extent that it matters. For example, with SIMD, it makes most sense to number the lanes in the same direction as addresses in memory, so that lane 0 is at offset 0 when doing a load or store. And if you want to reinterpret the bits of a SIMD value as a different type, little-endian is the only sane way to do it. And so on.

I've become fond of thinking about little-endian becoming known as a universal "CPU byte order", to complement "network byte order". Each order makes the most sense for its domain.