[hedora]

I made a comment a few levels up to a sibling where I point out the parts of the C89 spec that are relevant.

Alignment requirements for integers are implementation defined, not undefined behavior. On x86, the implementation used to define the alignment requirement to be one byte.

In fact, if you've do enought hardware register and bus-level (e.g., PCIe) programming, you'll quickly realize that there are all sorts of other exotic implementation-defined alignment constraints on modern systems.

[armitron]

Pretty much everything you wrote in that comment is wrong since you're interpreting the spec in a way that's clearly not what the spec describes (e.g. the spec is talking about alignment requirements for conversions, but you generalize it to "alignment requirements" which is dead wrong).