The same is true for the rest of the oddball stuff. It's dead now. Nobody is even trying. There is no longer any reason to make the C standard nasty in order to support these systems. The plug should have been pulled on them long ago, when they were well under 1% of the market and declining, but now they are nothing. No standards-conforming compiler supports that old stuff.
Even back at 1%, hurting everybody to support that stuff was not worthwhile. It was a terrible trade-off to make.
- little vs big endian
- signed int layout
- float layout
- includes vary
- bit field implementations vary
- loads of undefined and implementation-defined behavior
NEWP was and is more than enough, while being much safer.
So not only is lack of safety expressed on the type system, something that C doesn't have, it also allows someone explicitly stating it is ok to risk its execution.
Except it's not. Not unless you cast it to uintptr_t. Doy. :) Understanding the underlying asm can give you context for what a pointer is, but you can't assume that a pointer is an integer, any more than you can assume 'int' is a machine word in length.
There are reasons why C seems so abstruse and abstract. It has to exist on a huge variety of architectures and environments, from supercomputers to tiny embedded microcontrollers. Fun fact: The Lisp Machine had a C compiler! In Lisp Machine C, pointers were fat: they consisted of a machine pointer to an allocated chunk of memory and an offset within that chunk. And of course it was invalid to have a pointer outside an allocated object; the machine would throw an exception if you even tried. Hence why C pointers are only well-defined over valid references to objects and arrays, one past the end of an array, and NULL. And lest you say, "well no modern cpu works like that anymore", there are programs out there written for the Burroughs architecture that are still running. Are you going to cut off the maintainers of those programs because the architecture they're coding for doesn't resemble an x86?
This is part of why I disdain the call for modernity in programming. "Modern" means "limited". "Modern" means "I have no intention of testing this on anything but my laptop, so I will make assumptions that suit my use case and fuck you if yours differs".
C is a pain in the ass, but it becomes more approachable if you take into account its history. And it still fits in your head more easily than Rust.