Unserialization from std::fstream?

I'm not sure what you're asking. The code you post doesn't read serialized data "of a known format or endianness". It copies bytes from the file to where ever, which could result in undefined behavior, and is very unlikely to result in the correct values unless by some weird bit of luck, the "known format" corresponds exactly to that used internally on your machine.

I a lot of cases, in fact, it will probably cause the program to crash; think of what might happen if the structure you're trying to read contains a pointer, for example.

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