Comment by samatman

I understand the reaction, but I don't agree. I suggest reading the associated proposal[0] along with the devlog, and having a real think about what's going on here. I'm responding to you saying that you "don't understand" the approach: reasonable, and resembles my initial reaction.

I was inclined to agree with you, but what decided it for me is that Zig has another mechanism for "reinterpret bytes". It's exposed on the stdlib as std.mem.asBytes, but this is literally a wrapper for the following:

    @ptrCast(@alignCast(ptr));

So nothing is lost here: if you need, for whatever reason (and those do exist), to get a raw array of underlying bytes, you absolutely may. Std.mem also has bytesToValue(T, bytes) T, which makes a copy. All the ingredients are there, and this family of mem functions are thin wrappers over builtins, which boil down to pointer casting, dereferencing, and comptime magic.

Also worth noting: packed structs in Zig are already defined as logically little-endian: the first field is of low significance, the second is above that, and so on. So this makes `@bitCast` consistent with an existing convention of treating integers as logically little-ended, without regard to how they're actually arrayed in memory.

Plus it stands to make low-level bit-twiddling, using oddly-sized integers, optimize better. I like that, especially when what we trade for that is: nothing. Nothing at all, this is a pure win.

I'd even guess it's that rare language update which silently fixes buggy code, where someone figured "well, basically everything is little-endian already" (or just didn't think about it), and now that code works properly on big-endian machines.

[0]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/19755