If you're talking about the cast from an int literal to a char pointer, that's not what's happening. That's common C shorthand for incrementing a pointer to poi

If you're talking about the cast from an int literal to a char pointer, that's not what's happening. That's common C shorthand for incrementing a pointer to point to the next element. For example, the char pointer increment compiles to: 4004fb: 48 83 c0 01 add $0x1,%rax While an int pointer increment compiles to: 40050c: 48 83 c0 04 add $0x4,%rax Because on my particular platform, an int is 4 bytes and a char is 1 byte and the memory is byte addressable.