Re: [boost] [Review] Boost.Endian mini-review

Subject: Re: [boost] [Review] Boost.Endian mini-review
From: Olaf van der Spek (ml_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-24 17:34:18

On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 9:03 PM, Nevin Liber <nevin_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On 24 January 2015 at 12:00, Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> In practice, the enhanced efficiency of aligned types is usually more
>> important than worry about someday encountering an odd-ball
>> architecture or use in an unaligned location.
>>
>
> I disagree with that for endian.  Most of those uses are in wire and file
> protocols, and they are either densely packed or based on the alignment of
> the original architecture that the protocol was developed on.  Unless one
> is transferring data between machines with different architectures, why
> would one use endian at all?

Because the protocol is specified as using big endian ints (for
example) and the code has to run on little endian machines too.

-- 
Olaf