Should I worry about the alignment during pointer casting?

Question

In my project we have a piece of code like this:

// raw data consists of 4 ints
unsigned char data[16];
int i1, i2, i3, i4;
i1 = *((int*)data);
i2 = *((int*         


        

Answer 1

You may want to show him how things can differ depending on the compiler version:

• GCC 4.3.4
• GCC 4.7.2

Apart from alignment there is a second problem: the standard allows you to cast an int* to char* but not the other way around (unless the char* was originally casted from an int*). See this post for more details.