To disk is probably a bad idea but over the wire has some legitimate applications. Being reliant on same endian systems can be alright if for example you're bui

To disk is probably a bad idea but over the wire has some legitimate applications. Being reliant on same endian systems can be alright if for example you're building a distributed computing system where the same binary will be executed on a bunch of systems and all you're doing is sharing computation results between those instances. You do get unrivaled serialization speed that way. Timely Dataflow [1] works that way by default, but it also has an option for "real" serialization if that is required. Admittedly that's a fairly specific application but it's real and sometimes it's a good tradeoff. [1] https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/timely-dataflow https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/timely-dataflow