Thank you everyone for your contributions. It seems the activity is dying down a little and some consensus has been reached, so I decided to summarize the thread here for my and other people's benefit. Unanswered question: One question which I posed in the original thread and didn't get picked up by anyone was to do with the metafunction is_mutable_range<T>. I use it to determine whether T is a range as opposed to just a value. I was suggesting is_mutable_range<> and is_const_range<> could be added to Boost.Range but nobody had any opinions. Basic interface: There were many suggestions for changes/improvements but in the end, it seemed that the proposed functional interface was generally ok. Beside the two functions swap<>() and swap_in_place<>(), there was a desire for two simpler alternatives, to<>() and from<>(), which would imply the "host" portion, i.e. swap<host_to_{little/big}>() would be equivalent to to<{little/big}>() and swap<{little/big}_to_host>() would be equivalent to from<{little/big}>(). The idea of "network" being a synonym for "big" was raised but ultimately rejected, due to the fact that the library shouldn't be tied to any particular device/protocol. Floating point values: There is a potential issue with swapping floating point values. This will be resolved by limiting the contexts in which swap<>, from<> and to<> can be used. Typed vs untyped: One of the most contentious issues of the whole thread, I think both sides have accepted that there is value in the other side's approach (or, at the very least, I don't see how my library is going to make it through the review unless I implement it :) Having said that, as the typed interface ultimately relies on copying of data, there may have to be some limitations on floating point values. Bitfields: There was some desire for generic bit swapping/bit fields. I have some ideas on this but for now I would prefer to concentrate on the byte-swapping issues and revisit this in the future. This seems like a reasonable plan for implementation. Thanks again for all the input. Tom