When does Endianness become a factor?

Question

Endianness from what I understand, is when the bytes that compose a multibyte word differ in their order, at least in the most typical case. So that an 16-bit integer may b

Answer 1

You shouldn't have to worry, unless you're at the border of the system. Normally, if you're talking in terms of the stl, you already passed that border.

It's the task of the serialization protocol to indicate/determine how a series of bytes can be transformed into the type you're sending, beit a built-in type or a custom type.

If you're talking built-in only, you may suffice with the machine-abstraction provided by tools provided by your environment]