Re: CritBit-Tree implementation for pike

[Marcus Comstedt (ACROSS) (Hail Ilpalazzo!) @ Pike (-) developers forum]

Well, it's not terribly complicated.  What it all boils down to is
this:  Any primitive object (i.e. scalar, floating point or pointer)
needs to reside at an address which is a multiple of the size of said
object.  The C compiler will normally take care of this for you, but
by performing pointer arithmetic on type-punned pointers it is
possible to shoot oneself in the foot.