It seems like you're one of the UB brigade that demands rigid adherence to the standard because some 8-bit microprocessor might not be able to read a 32-bit val

It seems like you're one of the UB brigade that demands rigid adherence to the standard because some 8-bit microprocessor might not be able to read a 32-bit value atomically. Nobody care about that, and when writing high performance code, you write the hardware you target and care about. Reading and writing to the same int in memory is atomic for every hardware platform I care about. Even alignment issues don't matter for anything this is going to be run on. > No. Just because you operate on the memory as if it was an int doesn't create an int there. Don't be dumb. They wrote an int to the beginning of the buffer and then had to cast back to it, like every piece of networking or file code that had to save a binary number.