On 04/01/2015 03:36 PM, Andreas Schuh wrote: > I believe I have encountered a bug in the optimization at least in > versions 4.8.4 and 4.9.2. The problem is not present in version > 4.6.3. The attached complete example code can be used to reproduce > the error (my system is Ubuntu 12.04). This code is crucial in > medical image processing where the NIfTI-1 file format is commonly > used. The respective function that is optimized incorrectly by most > recent C/C++ compilers of GCC was copied from the NIfTI-1 C library > and is used by many medical image processing tools. It is > responsible for swapping the bytes if necessary when the image data > was written on a system with differing endianness. Sure, but it's not standard C. You really don't need to alias a struct of two bytes and a short, and these are not compatible types. (I can give you chapter and verse of the C standard if you really want it, but the rule is simple: don't expect a cast between pointers to different types to work. Doing so via a hidden void* doesn't help.) It'd be perfectly legal to do this swap with an array of bytes, because byte arrays can alias anything. Like this: char *p = ar; for( ii=0 ; ii < 2*n ; ii +=2 ){ tt = p[ii]; p[ii] = p[ii+1] ; p[ii+1] = tt ; } If you really need to compile stuff like this you can use -fno-strict-aliasing, but I'd fix the code if I were you. Andrew.