Well, not all software, only where you'd decide to use that feature. In non performance-critical code, I'd disable certain optimizations anyway to make sure tha

Well, not all software, only where you'd decide to use that feature. In non performance-critical code, I'd disable certain optimizations anyway to make sure that sanity checks do not get optimized away. (The Linux kernel had a few high-profile cases of this problem.) One way to implement my idea would be as pragmas that tell the compiler "don't optimize away this null check", "assume this variable can alias", "just emit the obvious ASM for memory access" or "put memory barriers around this code". I don't see how this kind of "stupid memory access" would make e.g. SROA impossible. If I just access the memory around "this", sure, I would not see the layout I'd naively expect. But that's not what I want anyway. I want to see the memory as it is actually laid out.