The library provides those functions too, but I don't see how having an arithmetic type with well defined size, endiannness and alignment is a bad thing. If yo

The library provides those functions too, but I don't see how having an arithmetic type with well defined size, endiannness and alignment is a bad thing. If you're defining a struct to mirror a data structure from a device, protocol or file format then the language / type system should let you define the properties of the fields, not necessarily force you to introduce a parsing/decoding stage which could be more easily bypassed.