Comment by AlotOfReading
16 days ago
Unaligned pointers are undefined behavior even when the hardware fully supports unaligned access, because you're violating the type's rules.
To be honest, I've never seen much indication that the C and C++ committees are particularly fond of each other. They sometimes coordinate, but they're mostly content letting each other evolve in different directions. C is the way it is only after a long process of evolution away from the bits and bytes of BCPL into the strictly typed language we got from ASNI.
Undefined behavior according to WG14 but perfectly fine on most architectures. Even on architectures that don't support it (what the fuck ARM cortex) the compilers do support it.
Yes, that's exactly the point I've been making. It's undefined today because C has a type system and that type system has this arbitrary rule, not because there are implementation constraints necessitating it (where it could just be implementation defined instead).