No, I'm advocating that the current behavior of C compiler is the only thing that really makes sense for ABI considerations. I opened my comment with: I'm not

No, I'm advocating that the current behavior of C compiler is the only thing that really makes sense for ABI considerations. I opened my comment with: I'm not sure I accept "consistency with a bytewise view of memory" as a well-defined, reasonable concept. You're starting from an assumption that there is something "important" about 8 bit fields, and that bitfields are a tool to express some externally defined memory layout. But unless your language also has "endianed" types for larger integers, it's already impossible to do that. And most languages don't claim or try to work with externally defined memory layouts. This entire topic disaggregates into 2 distinct categories: deterministic packing for architecture ABIs, which needs to be consistent but can be arbitrary. And representing externally defined structures, which is a matter of exact representation capabilities.