You can have memset/memcmp work for individual structs by setting the padding yourself, and to make sure you do it right, on GCC/clang you can use -Wpadded. It'

You can have memset/memcmp work for individual structs by setting the padding yourself, and to make sure you do it right, on GCC/clang you can use -Wpadded. It's probably best to do that on a case-by-case basis, unless you're prepared to deal with a lot of compiler warnings/errors though. #pragma GCC diagnostic push #pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wpadded" struct foo { uint8_t a; uint8_t _pad[3]; uint32_t b; }; #pragma GCC diagnostic pop