A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads “Happy 17th Birthday”

  • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
    2·
    2 days ago

    In a normal byte format it wouldn’t help, the byte standard breaks off bits into 8 bit chunks and calls them bytes (I’m not trying to explain basics, just putting it there for background), little-endian excels at using the least number of bits to express larger numbers in a stream. If you wanted to send any number from 0-255 you only need 1 byte, for 256-512 you need two bytes (or 16 bits), in little-endian it can be represented in just 9 bits, or up to 1024 in 10 bits, etc.

    Doesn’t matter for much to many people, but when the number gets big enough you can save a lot of bandwidth.