I made a comment a few levels up to a sibling where I point out the parts of the C89 spec that are relevant. Alignment requirements for integers are implementa

I made a comment a few levels up to a sibling where I point out the parts of the C89 spec that are relevant. Alignment requirements for integers are implementation defined, not undefined behavior. On x86, the implementation used to define the alignment requirement to be one byte. In fact, if you've do enought hardware register and bus-level (e.g., PCIe) programming, you'll quickly realize that there are all sorts of other exotic implementation-defined alignment constraints on modern systems.