Dereferencing type-punned pointer will break strict-aliasing rules

Question

I used the following piece of code to read data from files as part of a larger program.

double data_read(FILE *stream,int code) {
        char data[8];
              


        

Answer 1

The authors of the C Standard wanted to let compiler writers generate efficient code in circumstances where it would be theoretically possible but unlikely that a global variable might have its value accessed using a seemingly-unrelated pointer. The idea wasn't to forbid type punning by casting and dereferencing a pointer in a single expression, but rather to say that given something like:

int x;
int foo(double *d)
{
  x++;
  *d=1234;
  return x;
}

a compiler would be entitled to assume that the write to *d won't affect x. The authors of the Standard wanted to list situations where a function like the above that received a pointer from an unknown source would have to assume that it might alias a seemingly-unrelated global, without requiring that types perfectly match. Unfortunately, while the rationale strongly suggests that authors of the Standard intended to describe a standard for minimum conformance in cases where a compiler would otherwise have no reason to believe that things might alias, the rule fails to require that compilers recognize aliasing in cases where it is obvious and the authors of gcc have decided that they'd rather generate the smallest program it can while conforming to the poorly-written language of the Standard, than generate code which is actually useful, and instead of recognizing aliasing in cases where it's obvious (while still being able to assume that things that don't look like they'll alias, won't) they'd rather require that programmers use memcpy, thus requiring a compiler to allow for the possibility that pointers of unknown origin might alias just about anything, thus impeding optimization.