Yes, it's totally possible to write good abstractions for this sort of basic operation, which handle both endianness and alignment. (QEMU's version of them use

Yes, it's totally possible to write good abstractions for this sort of basic operation, which handle both endianness and alignment. (QEMU's version of them uses memcpy(), again relying on the compiler to optimise this to a simple load where the host CPU supports unaligned accesses.) I agree that doing that kind of thing so code can be endian-agnostic and keeping the ifdefs to a minimum is better style and easier to understand. But if the big-endian case isn't run through CI then bugs will still creep in, where people forget to use the abstraction and just cast a buffer pointer to do a 32-bit read, or where they don't keep the distinction between 'a 32 bit value in host endianness' and 'a 32-bit value in host-independent endianness (eg network data, or pixel data)' straight and forget a conversion step. QEMU's testing on s390 and ppc64 catches a steady trickle of this kind of bug before it goes into the codebase. (You can catch unaligned-access bugs on x86 with clang/gcc address-sanitizer, I think, but it can't help with endianness bugs.)