The Byte Order Fiasco
It is a ridiculous feature of modern C that you have to write the super verbose "mask and shift" code, which then gets compiled to a simple `mov` and maybe a `bswap`. Wheras, the direct equivalent in C, an assignment with a (type changing) cast, is illegal. There is a huge mismatch between the assumptions of the C spec and actual machine code.<p>One of the few reasons I ever even reached to C is the ability to slurp in data and reinterpret it as a struct, or the ability to reason in which registers things will show up and mix in some `asm` with my C.<p>I think there should really be a dialect of C(++) where the machine model is exactly the physical machine. That doesn't mean the compiler can't do optimizations, but it shouldn't do things like prove code as UB and fold everything to a no-op. (Like when you defensively compare a pointer to NULL that according to spec must not be NULL, but practically could be...)<p>`-fno-strict-overflow -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks` gets you halfway there, but it would really only be viable if you had a blessed `-std=high-level-assembler` or `-std=friendly-c` flag.