Comment by flohofwoe
8 hours ago
The thing is that the actual compiler behaviour matters more for real-world projects than what the C standard says. E.g. the C standard was always retroactive, it merely tried to reign in wildly different compiler behaviour at the time when the standard was new. It mostly succeeded, but still the most useful C and C++ compiler features are living in non-standard extensions.
Unaligned access being fine in one architecture, but not in others would create separate dialects, regardless of being blessed by ISO C.
Just don't do unaligned access, it's a dialect that doesn't exist currently, and should never exist.