To make it even better, you can declare classes that are exactly the size of your primitive type, and do things like endianness conversion for you. I will ofte

To make it even better, you can declare classes that are exactly the size of your primitive type, and do things like endianness conversion for you. I will often even make functions that convert, e.g., a bid into a specific price type. Having all of the numerical quantities in your trading system strongly typed makes working on it much easier. The strong type system that enables this, without sacrificing any runtime speed is my favorite part about C++.