Reading bits in far too many ways
fgiesen.wordpress.com
fgiesen.wordpress.com
Unfortunately in many cases like image and video codecs, that decision has been made for you already --- and not in the direction that's most efficient for a CPU (but of course is pretty much immaterial for hardware.) I suspect "It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that one variant is better than another because it looks prettier" was what drove those decisions.
The big-endian/MSB-first order requires extra "bit movement" if you are maintaining a bit buffer in a register, since the bits of interest are always going to reside in the topmost bits, but you often need them in the lowest bits to use them. With little-endian/LSB-first, the bits of interest are already in the lowest position, and naturally "fall off the end" as you shift right and replenish into the upper bits. IMHO another reason to prefer little-endian: it's very logically consistent.
With the LSB-first approach, where the current bits are already the low end, you usually can't use them directly (e.g., to do arithmetic on them, or use them in an address calculation) since you need to mask off the higher bits[1] - how do you do that? You can use two shifts: << then >>, or generate a mask and AND it, or ...? If the number of bits read amount is a compile-time constant it's probably as simple as a single AND, but the non-constant case seems a bit worse for LSB-first.
You say that the current bits just naturally fall off the end after shifting in the LSB-first case, but the same is true in the MSB-first case: they fall off the left side after a left shift, instead of off the right side after a right shift.
[1] Yes, there are exceptions such as if you want to use say exactly 8 bits and your hardware has some efficient way to refer to the bottom 8 bits of a register (see: x86) or if having garbage in the high bits doesn't matter for your subsequent operations (or perhaps you can amortize the zeroing over several bit reads: e.g,. you read a bunch of 7-bit fields, add them, then zero the high bits).
Us humans often find little-endian confusing because we write numbers big-endian. If you have the number 258 (0x102) in memory in little endian (which most computers use) 32-bit, it is hex 02 01 00 00, binary 00000010 00000001 00000000 00000000. If you bit-shift that one to the right without care, you end up with 00000001 00000000 10000000 00000000, hex 01 00 80 00, which is 8,388,609.
To fix it, write your digits also in little-endian order, so the first number is 10000000 010000000 00000000 00000000. Then the shift operations match expectations.
Yes it does. Consider an MSB-first ordering, and you want to extract 4 bits to use as an integer or whatever: in the bit buffer, that would be "aaaaxxxx...", where "a" are the bits you're interested in. You'll need to copy from the bit buffer to the "work" register, then shift right in order to put them in the right place. Furthermore, to "eject" those bits, you need to shift left and insert from the lower bits, i.e. the bit buffer becomes "xxxx..." in its most significant bits.
With LSB-first, "...xxxxaaaa", the bits do not need any shifting --- they're already in the right place.
The bit-endianesss you chose greatly impacts how your bit-reading loop will be implemented. In particular, if you want to use some bits, you want them in the low bits: if you write the value 42 into a 7-bit field, and then later I give you back (42 << 56) or something, you are going to be very confused: you expect to get back 42 (i.e., the return value equals 42, or to be pedantic the 7-bit field should be right-aligned in the uint32_t or uint64_t return value).
Of course the goddamn Internet decided to go MSB, so we'll forever be stuck with that friction.
And don't get me started on line endings. Gah!
uint32_t triple = *(uint32_t *)in;
*out++ = base64[triple & MASK];
*out++ = base64[(triple >> 6) & MASK];
*out++ = base64[(triple >> 12) & MASK];
*out++ = base64[(triple >> 18) & MASK];
in += 3;