从套接字读取消息时如何获得字节序？

Question

I am using go and protocol buffers. go program sends encoded protocol buffer messages to clients connected to the socket. Now since protocol-buffers is not delimited, clients don't know how much data to read from the socket.

I am planning to prefix the message with the message length, a 32bit integer. So clients can read 4 bytes, get the length and read the full message.

I can put an integer value into the bytes array using binary package. Something like,

binary.Write(buf, binary.LittleEndian, value)

Now the question is, write needs a byte order and how will the receiving end know what is the byte order? Is there a way to deal with this without specifying explicit byte order?

Answer 1

The convention is that network byte order is big endian, but your client and server must agree in any case. Specify the byte order explicitly.

Edit: Reading the Protobuf docs, it might be better to use proto.EncodeVarint and proto.DecodeVarint to write the length before the message, for the sake of consistency.