Comment by procaryote
16 hours ago
Even if the code might not end up requiring it, if you write it with the assumption that bytes are 8 bits, it's good to document that with a static assert so someone porting things knows there will be dragons
It's a pretty neat way to drop some corner cases from your mental load without building subtle traps
That's pretty silly IMHO, it should be incredibly obvious to anybody who is ever in a position to port code to a machine with non-8-bit-bytes that there will be dragons there. It also requires including limit.h which you might not otherwise need.
It's just not a realistic edge case, the machines like this are either antiquated or are tiny microcontrollers that can't practically run a POSIX OS. Very little code in the real world is generic enough to be useful in that environment (a good example might be a fixed point signal processing library).
There is no assertion in the entire Linux kernel that CHAR_BIT is eight, despite that assumption being hardcoded in many places.