I prefer doing some quick sanity checks and then printing an error message like "User error: Your computer is weird. Buy a normal computer." if they fail. The c

I prefer doing some quick sanity checks and then printing an error message like "User error: Your computer is weird. Buy a normal computer." if they fail. The convenience of being able to use memory-mapped files directly without any endianness / alignment bureaucracy is more important to me than supporting some hypothetical hardware I don't have access to. Low-level code like that rarely lives beyond 5-10 years anyway. Even if some weird future hardware starts getting popular, the code will most likely be rewritten at least once before that hardware actually matters.