Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, why so serious? I called it "a bit of a stretch ;D" - there was a reason for that smiley. I'm well aware BE is alive enough to be around. If you can't live without knowing, sure, my stake in dismissing big endian architectures is that I can't in fact dismiss BE architectures because I have users on it. And it's incredibly painful to test because while my users have such hardware, actually buying a good test platf…
To be fair to IBM, with s390x they do have a "community cloud" programme where open source projects can apply to get a Linux s390x VM to use for things like CI: https://community.ibm.com/zsystems/l1cc/ . But yeah, BE MIPS is super awkward because the target systems are all embedded things that are bad dev/CI machines.
qemu CPU emulation exists too, but that's painfully slow for an actual CI run, and I'm not sure I trust it enough with e.g. AF_NETLINK translation to use the "-user" variant on top of an LE host rather than booting a full Linux (or even BSD).
And in the very best case, proper testing would pit BE and LE systems "against" each other; if I run tests on BE against itself there's a good risk of mis-encodings on send being mis-decoded back on receive and thus not showing as breakage…
… really, it's just a pain to deal with. Even the beauty (in my eyes) of these T4240 ppc64 systems doesn't bridge that :(