Yeah I'm completely ok with reading into a packed struct. I think you may as well and indeed in most cases it's more explicit and succinct. I think using that

Yeah I'm completely ok with reading into a packed struct. I think you may as well and indeed in most cases it's more explicit and succinct. I think using that internally leads to problems, so generally I advocate (if you're going to do this) using those as "packets" or whatever that are just PODs. You can validate those, then build higher level, internal structs from them. Generally I find whenever you see packed structs anywhere but the "I got this from the network/filesystem" level, the devs aren't considering taint analysis, which is a red flag to me. You shouldn't be dealing with external data outside a specific, well-defined layer.