The obvious and uncontroversial answer is that there is no sane way this gcc extension can be dropped. Dropping the extension would mean there is no performant

The obvious and uncontroversial answer is that there is no sane way this gcc extension can be dropped. Dropping the extension would mean there is no performant way to get at the bits of IEEE 754 floating point data in C (and perhaps other data types, but that's the one in my use case).