[scrubs]

I sort of agree ... bit casting from an N width integer into an array of ... woah ... that's too far. It's bitcast not byte-cast which has an implied reinterpretation on a same or smaller word size in the cpu.

Once you see that the fact somebody has a u24 in their code is between them and the compiler alone.

As others probably noted byte casting (keeping the same endianess) is what unions are for.