... endian library
It looks as though it hasn't been proposed for review: http://www.boost.org/more/formal_review_schedule.html
... quite a bit of discussion about it, with many interesting ideas/additions/alternatives raised, so a mini-review (or something) would probably happen.
It's been a while (almost a year?) since Beman uploaded his endian utility. Beman, is endian-06.zip the latest, in the vault? Is the first step in creating a portable binary archive collecting and summarizing the discussions from a year ago and performing a mini-review to make the endian utility part of Boost? This would provide endian utility for integral types. The floating point utilities from Johan (which I haven't looked at yet) would need a place to reside (they could reside in the serialization archive, but it seems natural to have them as a separate utility). I'm going to look at the example serialization code - one concern I have (at this point an uneducated concern, since so far I've only casually read the serialization docs) is that I'd like a way to use a binary archive that doesn't have the "metadata" that is normally provided in serialization archives - I want to be able to read / write or send / receive buffers of packed binary data where I have complete control over every byte - I don't want type ids, version numbers, pointer sharing semantics, etc (unless I explicitly put them in my code). I realize this is an orthogonal concern to the portable binary mechanics, but I wouldn't be surprised if the users and applications wanting compact and efficient binary archives overlap significantly with the users and apps wanting control of every byte in the stream. Cliff