That is exactly my approach to this issue (and at least gcc seems to be clever enough to mostly optimize the abstraction layer away). On the other hand you will

That is exactly my approach to this issue (and at least gcc seems to be clever enough to mostly optimize the abstraction layer away). On the other hand you will see the direct approach with structs directly mapping to hardware, questionable uses of volatile to make the thing actually work and so on very often in various production code.