How to write endian agnostic C/C++ code?

Question

I did some googling and couldn\'t find any good article on this question. What should I watch out for when implementing an app that I want to be endian-agnostic?

Answer 1

This might be a good article for you to read: The byte order fallacy

The byte order of the computer doesn't matter much at all except to compiler writers and the like, who fuss over allocation of bytes of memory mapped to register pieces. Chances are you're not a compiler writer, so the computer's byte order shouldn't matter to you one bit.

Notice the phrase "computer's byte order". What does matter is the byte order of a peripheral or encoded data stream, but--and this is the key point--the byte order of the computer doing the processing is irrelevant to the processing of the data itself. If the data stream encodes values with byte order B, then the algorithm to decode the value on computer with byte order C should be about B, not about the relationship between B and C.