[veyh]

You can have memset/memcmp work for individual structs by setting the padding yourself, and to make sure you do it right, on GCC/clang you can use -Wpadded. It's probably best to do that on a case-by-case basis, unless you're prepared to deal with a lot of compiler warnings/errors though.

    #pragma GCC diagnostic push
    #pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wpadded"
    struct foo {
      uint8_t a;
      uint8_t _pad[3];
      uint32_t b;
    };
    #pragma GCC diagnostic pop