
The Rust language continues to make progress for use in the Linux kernel <https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/05/rust_for_linux_kernel_project/>. The article ends with a comment from Linus Torvalds about the old “endian wars” which have been a feature of the computing landscape since byte addressability became common: should the bytes of a number be arranged in big-endian order (most significant end at the lowest address) or little-endian (least significant end at the lowest address)? In the latest patches, Ojeda proposed to use big-endian order for long symbols in the kernel symbol table, needed because Rust symbols "can become quite long due to namespacing introduced by modules, types, traits, generics." Torvalds responded: "Why is this in big-endian order? Let's just try to kill big-endian data, it's disgusting and should just die already... networking has legacy reasons from the bad old days when byte order wars were still a thing, but those days are gone." Having used both kinds of computer architectures over the years, I agree. Little-endian ordering is more mathematically consistent.