Ask HN: Is big-endian dead?
As long as we use the traditional network protocols and socket API it's not "dead" dead. The other name for big-endian is "network order", after all.As way to serialize data (wire / disk format) it's becoming more common. FlatBuffers and Cap'n'Proto are the  popular ones. They reduce (completely eliminate?) byte shuffling when de-serializing.In one instance I was reading a spec for an industry-specific protocol. At first I was looking at it and thinking "What the... they are padding stuff in a strange way, and using little-endian for the data". Then it suddenly dawned on me, that they've designed the spec to be whatever GCC on x86-64 Linux machine would do to layout C the structures in memory.So someone very lazy could just define a struct and cast into it as data comes from the wire. Someone one a big endian machine, would have to do a lot more legwork to get the thing working. But given that there aren't many of those around, it was deemed an acceptable tradeoff.