[swift-evolution] [late pitch] UnsafeBytes proposal

[Chris Lattner]

> On Aug 23, 2016, at 5:28 PM, Trent Nadeau via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> For an architecture to be C-compatible, its byte size must be 8 bits. Given the need to run C everywhere and that almost all OSes are written in C, it's a very safe assumption that a byte equals 8 bits. At this point, I think the only thing where that's not true are certain micro-controllers for which there are specialized compilers.

Right, Swift depends on Clang.  Clang assumes that the target machine has 8-bit-byte-addressable memory.  I don’t see any reason that Swift should pretend to work on the (only historically interesting) systems that had 9-bit (or any other weird number) addressable units.

-Chris