Re: [boost] [Review] Boost.Endian mini-review

On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 9:03 PM, Nevin Liber wrote:

On 24 January 2015 at 12:00, Beman Dawes wrote:

...

In practice, the enhanced efficiency of aligned types is usually more important than worry about someday encountering an odd-ball architecture or use in an unaligned location.

I disagree with that for endian. Most of those uses are in wire and file protocols, and they are either densely packed or based on the alignment of the original architecture that the protocol was developed on. Unless one is transferring data between machines with different architectures, why would one use endian at all?

Because the protocol is specified as using big endian ints (for example) and the code has to run on little endian machines too. -- Olaf