Why is it an issue any more than say, order of fields in a struct is an issue? In one case you read bytes off the disk by doing ((b[0] << 8) | b[1]) (or equivalent), with the order reversed the other way around. Any application-level (say, not a compiler, debugger, etc) program should not even need to know the native byte order, it should only need to know the encoding that the file it’s trying to read used.