[jackmott]

>data structures already have to sit in memory looking a certain way, why can't we just squirt that on the wire instead of some fancy bespoke type-length-value struct?

In C/C++ ya can! When making games in college that is exactly what we did. Take the struct, dump it into the socket. I was rather shocked when trying to recreate the same system in C#. "I can't? I CAN'T?"

[paulddraper]

Well...that's kind of the point of C#. Enforced memory safety.

Use C if that's not what you want. Don't hammer with a screwdriver.

[QuercusMax]

That's an absolutely terrible idea if you want any kind of forward / backward compatibility. Just about any system is better than dumping structs over the network, once you're dealing with a system that can evolve.

[izacus]

Yeah, I once had to write an Android / Desktop C++ implementation of such an API that was squirting iOS datastructures over socket. The API was built by a programmer who didn't know what endianess (or size of the structs) was.

That was a special kind of hell :/

[heywire]

You might be surprised just how many successful applications simply dump a packed struct to disk as a serialization format (or even transmit it over the wire). If the operating environment (OS/hardware) is known to be of a certain type, endianness is not a concern.

[QuercusMax]

It's not just endianness; it's about maintainability. If you ever think you might change the struct, EVER, you need to worry about these things.