[markrages]

But the union won't crash either (the compiler will keep it aligned), the conversion compiles to no-op, and doesn't waste memory.

Embedded targets are always memory-constrained. If they aren't, you are wasting money on hardware.

[jakobegger]

I was thinking about the case when you get unaligned data (eg you are reading from a file or from the network). Then you need to copy the data anyway.