If you're not making assumptions about the values stored in your variables, then every little arithmetic operation can lead to unexpected wraps (UB for signed t

If you're not making assumptions about the values stored in your variables, then every little arithmetic operation can lead to unexpected wraps (UB for signed types). What follows is that we need to make assumptions. Don't write an if conditional in front of every operation like a forgetful person - but assume that "my_structure" contains good values that you can safely add. Usually it's very easy - require that size and offset are validly indexing an object, and require that objects are of a sane size (I rarely have in-memory objects larger than a few megabytes, and for most code I posit that it is a mistake to not chunk and stream huge datasets). Done, no real need to worry. If you cannot make any assumptions about the values contained in a "my_structure" then that means the code is at an API boundary, which is the perfect place where such check (if-statement) must be placed. At internal code places, checks are wasted effort, and at most a compiler switch to detect wraps (logic errors) would often be a much better choice than paranoid code where each line of code can't trust the previous line, and where one can't see actual work being done because it's all covered in mistrust. Unnecessary mistrust (i.e. mistrust at places strictly inside maintenance boundaries which are not strategic checkpoints) only makes it hard to write code that actually does something, and might possibly cause more bugs than it could ever save.