Dear All, I've just done some quick benchmarks of Beman's proposed byte-swapping code using the following test program: #include <cstdint> #include <iostream> #include <arpa/inet.h> // for htonl() using std::uint32_t; static inline uint32_t byteswap(uint32_t src) { #if defined(USE_GCC_BUILTIN) return __builtin_bswap32(src); #elif defined(USE_HTONL) return htonl(src); #elif defined(USE_REV_INSTR) uint32_t target; __asm__ ( "rev %0, %1\n" : "=r" (target) : "r" (src) ); return target; #elif defined(USE_BEMAN) const char* s (reinterpret_cast<const char*>(&src)); uint32_t target; char * t (reinterpret_cast<char*>(&target) + sizeof(target) - 1); *t = *s; *--t = *++s; *--t = *++s; *--t = *++s; return target; #else #error "Define USE_*" #endif } int main() { uint32_t s = 0; for (uint32_t i = 0; i < 1000000000; ++i) { s += byteswap(i); } std::cout << s << "\n"; // Expect 506498560 } I've tested this on two systems: (A): Marvell ARMv5TE ("Feroceon") @ 1.2 GHz, g++ 4.4 (B): Freescale ARMv7 (i.MX53, Coretex A8) @ 1.0 GHz, g++ 4.6.1 Compiled with: --std=c++0x -O4 Execution times in seconds are: A B USE_GCC_BUILTIN 29.4 3.0 USE_HTONL 12.6 3.0 USE_REV_INSTR n/a 3.0 USE_BEMAN 17.6 8.0 ARM architecture version 6 (IIRC) introduced a "rev" byte-swapping instruction. On system B, which supports this, it is used by the gcc builtin and glibc's htonl() giving better performance than Beman's code. On system A which does not support this instruction, the gcc builtin makes a library call; I've not looked at what htonl() does. What do people see on other platforms? How important do we consider performance to be for this library? Regards, Phil.