[ulbu]

you need different packed structs for little- and big-endian data. and casting with little-endian data is a nightmare - you need to reverse-cascade your struct fields to be in accordance with the little-endian bit-pattern. (or have a comptime function that does it for you, of course. but then you lose all declarations for the struct). what should be a simple writing down of a protocol is now a pedantic and error-prone ordeal.

[charcircuit]

This has been largely solved by everyone agreeing to use little endian. There aren't really use cases for wanting to convert between them.

[jstimpfle]

Does that mean there are no file formats thatbuse big endian? And network byte order isn't a thing?

[teravor]

    > there are no file formats thatbuse big endian

if someone chooses to do that they own the problems.

    > network byte order isn't a thing

if the network serializes/deserializes for you (kernel primitives) then you don't care what it does. if it doesn't and for some reason you choose to use big endian, again, you own the problem.