[matheusmoreira]

Because sometimes people need to reinterpret data as an array of 8/16/32/64 bit elements. Sometimes people also need to reinterpret things as a structure.

This is independent of how many bytes the underlying platform can address. If we have 8 bit processing code but the platform can only address 16 bits at a time, it should be up to the compiler to generate code that works. Compilers already do stuff like that in other circumstances.

[jeffbee]

Those people need to be copying, otherwise the reinterpretation might not be working. The char data might not be correctly aligned, for example. Recently went through a big nightmare where a C++ codebase that had accreted on x86 was thought to be ported to another platform where alignment actually matters and there were all manner of rare low-level malfunctions stemming from the idea that you can just wantonly cast a char* to structured data.