> The only thing that cares at the application layer is the application code, True, but... > it can just say "everything is little endian" and be done with it

> The only thing that cares at the application layer is the application code, True, but... > it can just say "everything is little endian" and be done with it. ... doesn't quite follow. If you're blitting integers directly, your code will break on either a big- or little-endian boxes. Better to pick a standard encoding and always serialize/deserialize properly whatever that means. That standard encoding may be little-endian (maybe better than big-endian - such systems are overwhelmingly more common on the desktop/server) or may be some packed representation. But ideally you could change the representation without changing application code other than the serialization/deserialization itself (which may well live in a library).