http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55177
--- Comment #5 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead dot org> 2012-11-02 19:41:28 UTC --- Indeed. Bear in mind that sometimes we *hide* the actual variable (by prefixing its name or putting it in a small struct of its own), just to *force* people to use the appropriate byte-swapping accessor functions/macros. And with good reason, because people will often forget to handle the endianness issues otherwise. So what you describe as 'really dumb' is actually something that we *force* people to do. We'd be much worse off without it. Of course, if we could just mark the variable with __attribute__((bigendian)) then perhaps it would all JustWork™ ... but that's a separate discussion ☹
