title: Why not use MPI_BYTE always?
body: <p>If I do not have to care about portability on heterogeneous systems (endianity...): </p>
  
  <p>Why not use MPI_BYTE for all communication? </p>
  
  <p>Especially for collectives and when dealing with composed data types, that would make life much easier. </p>
  
  <p><strong>edit:</strong> I just found <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2754090/mpi-and-c-structs">MPI and C structs</a> . The answers are applicable to my question.</p>