Comment by LoganDark
3 years ago
> Everything is a valid char array but I can't place structs on top of one? Oh well, nothing I can do about it. I'll just keep strict aliasing disabled.
Well, yeah. Strict aliasing is less about the incidental values of memory addresses and more about the actual semantics of what you're doing. Where writing a struct into the middle of a char array makes no sense because you have no guarantee in the type system that the array is properly sized or aligned to contain that struct.
The compiler knows the size of statically allocated buffers and can be told about alignments with:
Is this information sufficient for correct code generation?
Strict aliasing doesn't allow the compiler to magically decide that someplace you are writing happens to be in a statically allocated buffer. Strict aliasing says you have a pointer of some type and what you do with it has to agree with the type of that pointer.