Byte Order package

Stateless byte-order conversion between native integers and their big-endian or little-endian wire representations.

Two primitives — BigEndian and LittleEndian — each provide the same set of methods:

• Read (u16, u32, u64, u128, and signed/float variants) — decode a value from any ReadSeq[U8] at a given offset.
• Write (push_u16, push_u32, push_u64, push_u128, and signed/float variants) — encode a value by appending bytes to an Array[U8].

Pick the primitive that matches the wire format you are reading or writing. Network protocols almost always use big-endian; file formats vary — check the spec.

When the sequence is an Array[U8], reads are optimized to a single native-width load plus a conditional byte swap, which the compiler reduces to a single instruction on architectures that support it.

When the sequence is not an Array[U8], reads fall back to a portable shift-and-OR implementation that works for any ReadSeq[U8].

Read methods are partial: they raise an error when the sequence does not contain enough bytes at the given offset.

Example

use "byte_order"

actor Main
  new create(env: Env) =>
    let buf = Array[U8]
    BigEndian.push_u32(buf, 0xDEADBEEF)
    // buf is [0xDE; 0xAD; 0xBE; 0xEF]

    try
      let v = BigEndian.u32[Array[U8] box](buf)?
      env.out.print(v.string())  // 3735928559
    end

Public Types

• primitive BigEndian
• primitive LittleEndian