What is this?

This is a small endianess library for C++14 and up. It is heavily inspired by Boost.Endian, enough so that I appended the copyright list with associated names.

Why not just use Boost.Endian?

Boost.Endian is a fairly large library. I haven't used about 75% of it ever. It requires Boost headers meaning it's difficult to separate it from Boost itself. I actually made a modified version of Boost.Endian that used the standard library but it was still a bit much too lug around.

When should I use Boost.Endian over this?

If you already rely on Boost.
If you need to support niche or older compilers (i.e. C++11 or even older in some cases).
If you have so many symbols and macros in your codebase that this library is causing symbol conflict somehow.
See differences for things we don't implement.

In otherwords, Boost.Endian is the crufty commercial-grade version of this library.

Notes

Boost.Endian is large because of C++11

C++11 was a huge leap but it had problems. For just some examples that affect Boost.Endian:

constexpr functions were only allowed a single return statement and no other statements.
It didn't allow void as a return type for constexpr meaning it had to be treated specially for in-place functions.
const member functions couldn't be overloaded by non-const member functions.
C++11 didn't allow variable template aliases.
C++11 compilers had misleading and sometimes incorrect warnings concerning forward-compatibility with C++14 and beyond.

Simply requiring a minimum of C++14 reduces the code by a lot.

Differences from Boost.Endian

Logic that deals with types that aren't a power of 2 aren't done here (i.e. no 24-bit buffer type).
bo::buf requires the value endianess be specified as a template argument.
Types for specific bit-widths won't be implemented, only the generic templatized types/functions will be done.
Requires at least C++14.
Provides convenience functions similar to what's in POSIX (e.g. bo::hton and bo::ntoh).
Provides convenience functions similar to what's in BSDs (e.g. bo::htobe and bo::betoh).
We rely on the compiler to generate decent assembly.
Relies only on memcpy from the CRT.

This doesn't support middle-endian

Minimum supported compilers

clang 3.5 or higher
gcc 5.1 or higher
djgpp 5.2 or higher
icc 17.0.0 or higher
Visual Studio 2017 (but earlier versions may work as well)

computerquip/bo