What Are The Reasons For Bit Shifting A Float Before Sending It Via A Network

Question

I work with Unity and C# - when making multiplayer games I've been told that when it comes to values like positions that are floats, I should use a bit shift operator on them before sending them and reverse the operation on receive. I have been told this not only allows for larger numbers values and is capable of maintaining floating point precision which may be lost. However, if I do not have to, I do not wish to run this operation every time I receive a packet unless I have to. Though the bottle necks seem to be the actual parsing of the bytes received. Especially without message framing and attempting to move from string to byte array. (But that's another story!)

My question are:

Are these valid reason to undergo the operation? Are they accurate statements? If not should I be running bit shift ops on my floats? If I should, what are the real reasons to do it?

Any additional information would be most appreciated.

One of the resourcesI'm referring to:

Answer 1

Main reasons for going back and forth to/from network byte order is to combat endianness caused problems, mainly to ensure each byte of multi byte values (long, int but also floats) is read and written in the way giving the same results regardless of architecture. This issue can be theoretically ignored if you are sure you are exchanging data between systems using the same endianness, but that's rather bad idea from very beginning as you are simply creating unneded technological debt and keep unjustified exceptions in the code ("It all works BUT on the same endianness only. What can go wrong?").

Depending on your app architecture you can rewrite the packet payload/data once you receive it and then use that version further in the code. Also note that you need to encode the data again prior sending it out.