Yes, you're technically correct, but I can assure you that byte-swapping is fast. It seems I should have just left out the fact that byte-swap is a single inst

Yes, you're technically correct, but I can assure you that byte-swapping is fast. It seems I should have just left out the fact that byte-swap is a single instruction on x86, I was trying to make the point that it is fast but I suppose the point missed its mark and the fact that it's a single instruction really doesn't matter. You can do the swap with a few shifts and it still takes no time at all. If speed really becomes such a factor that this is too slow doing the encoding and decoding, you'll likely be looking at replacing this framework with a more hardcoded solution, not removing byte-swaps.