[iscoelho]

The purpose of zero-copy can be to avoid deserialization at all. All you do to deserialize is:

uint8_t *buf = ...; struct example_payload *payload = (struct example_payload *) buf;

That's why when you access the variables you need to byte order swap. This is absolutely not portable, I agree. I also agree that it is error-prone. However, it is the reality of a lot of performance critical software.