>As long as all you care about is x86/x86_64/PowerPC (and probably ARM as well), then you can trust that the compiler is going to generate code which copies the first two bytes of x into the memory occupied by y.
That's the thing that haberman is trying to tell you, you can't trust that any more, even with architectures you think you know. What you said was true about 10 years ago, but things have changed. Go read about "-fno-strict-aliasing" [1].
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>As long as all you care about is x86/x86_64/PowerPC (and probably ARM as well), then you can trust that the compiler is going to generate code which copies the first two bytes of x into the memory occupied by y.
That's the thing that haberman is trying to tell you, you can't trust that any more, even with architectures you think you know. What you said was true about 10 years ago, but things have changed. Go read about "-fno-strict-aliasing" [1].
[1] http://thiemonagel.de/2010/01/no-strict-aliasing/