🚀 go-pugleaf

   From: eru@tnso04.tele.nokia.fi (Erkki Ruohtula)
   Date: 24 Nov 1995 06:12:02 -0500

   even in cases where
     *a = *b;
   fails because of misaligment, doing the copying using memcpy as in
     memcpy(a, b, sizeof(*a));
   must not fail.

No, because once the program has generated an invalid pointer, the
resulting behavior is undefined.  See ANSI C section 3.3.4 page 46
lines 36-37.  For example, on some word-oriented implementations,
sizeof(int*) < sizeof(char*), and attempting to create an unaligned
int* pointer will generate garbage.  Any C program that relies on
unaligned pointers has undefined behavior.

If you want an unaligned data pointer, use char* or void*; if you use
a more restrictive type like int*, the standard says that GCC is
entitled to assume that the pointer is properly aligned.

For more on this subject please see Joe Buck's article
<news:410n4j$jqv@hermes.synopsys.com> (1995-08-18).