[HowardStark]

The fact that strict aliasing has to be broken to use the API shows that, amongst other things, the API is from a different era of practicality over correctness.

In the past, people have popped up to say “but that’s only in the bind() implementation side” (when talking about `sockaddr`, for instance) but I find this argument amusing. At the end of the day, if something breaks because of this, that nuance is lost amidst the mass of frustration.

[gnubison]

Are you sure? My impression from e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13210239/can-a-c-compile... is that it’s alright to cast between a pointer to a struct and a pointer to its first member.

[Asooka]

You can also say that strict aliasing is incompatible with the original design of C (i.e. it's a huge mess). We should have never had undefined behaviour in C to begin with, that should have been a separate language (possibly one that can still #include C headers and talk the same ABI).

[roblabla]

Ah, I hadn't considered the whole sockaddr/sockaddr_storage/sockaddr_in/sockaddr_un... thing, yeah that's a mess. I guess a more modern API would either use opaque pointers or an union (though that has its own share of disadvantages). Thanks for bringing this up!

[mananaysiempre]

Note that it wouldn’t be a strict aliasing violation, for example, if the argument to bind() were typed const sa_family_t *. The annoying cast would still be required, but very much legal (as long as the other side hasn’t screwed up).