[zerokernel]

> but that's only because no one actually cares about these architectures.

This. Optimizing performance on BE is a waste of everyone's time and resources.

[classichasclass]

Except, of course, for those small number of us who primarily do run on a BE platform. I don't mind doing this work, just let us do it.

[kentonv]

FWIW I'd be very happy to accept patches adding the appropriate platform-specific inline assembly around here: https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/c++/src/c...

(But the status quo on BE is that it does a load followed by a byte swap, which is probably pretty cheap anyway. The compiler might even already know how to optimize that into the appropriate LE-load instruction.)