alt Hacker NewsIf you comes to low level network protocol (e.g. writing a TCP stack), the "network byte order" is always big-endian.
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It goes without saying that all binary network protocols should document their byte order, and that if you're implementing a protocol documented as big endian you should use ntohl and friends to ensure correctness.
However if designing a new network protocol, choosing big endian is insanity. Use little endian, skip the macros, and just add
#ifndef LITTLE_ENDIAN
#error
And honestly at this point it's mostly a historical artifact, if we write that kind of stuff then sure we need to care but to produce modern stuff is a honestly massive waste of time at this point.
FWIW I doing hobby-stuff for Amiga's (68k big-endian) but that's just that, hobby stuff.
Prometheus index format is also a big-endian binary file - haven’t found any reference to why it was chosen.
That's a serialization format.