[_nalply]

What he said: if you read bytes with some byte order, you compose them yourself correctly, no byte swapping but just reading byte for byte and convert them to the number value you need. The architecture byte order is implicit as long as you use the architecture's tools to convert the bytes.

Rust, for example has from_be_bytes(), from_le_bytes() and from_ne_bytes() methods for the number primitives u16, i16, u32, and so on. They all take a byte array of the correct length and interpret them as big, little and native endian and convert them to the number.

The first two methods work fine on all architectures, and that's what this article is about.

The third method, however, is architecture-dependent and should not be used for network data, because it would work differently and that's what you don't want. In fact, let me cite this part from the documentation. It's very polite but true.

> As the target platform’s native endianness is used, portable code likely wants to use from_be_bytes or from_le_bytes, as appropriate instead.