Rant-y. I don't like that. > The byte order of the computer doesn't matter much at all except to compiler writers and the like Binary protocol parsing is one

Rant-y. I don't like that. > The byte order of the computer doesn't matter much at all except to compiler writers and the like Binary protocol parsing is one area that relies heavily on byte ordering, struct packaging and alignment. Tangentially, binary file parsing that is optimized for speed will have the same dependency. In fact, anything that deals with fast processing of the off-the-wire data will want to know about the byte order.