> Data is serialized over the wire (or stored on disk) in the same format/byte order that it is stored in memory That's just not true. You can read about the

> Data is serialized over the wire (or stored on disk) in the same format/byte order that it is stored in memory That's just not true. You can read about the wire format over here, and AFAIK no mainstream language stores things in memory like this: https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding I've had to debug protobuf messages, which is not fun at all, and it's absolutely parsed.