GCC's interpretation of the C99 aliasing rules, to be charitable,
creates a dialect of C intended for a better programmers than I am
certain of my ability to be in all times.  I just spent 2 hours
tracking down a platform-hyperspecific libevent bug that turned out to
be because of this, and darned if I ever want to do *that* again.

One of Linus's recent rants will give you a picture of why GCC's
behavior here can lead to fun surprises in your binaries:
http://lwn.net/Articles/316126/

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