To be fair writing trully portable C that does useful things is not that simple. When was the last time you made sure your code supports CHAR_BIT != 8 for example.
Yeah for sure, I just didn’t want to introduce multi-architecture portability since the main issue at hand was intra-arch portability.
But yeah, when you get into multiple architectures, it gets gnarly. Take even something as simple as instruction ordering when porting from x86_64 to arm64
I thought that because the C standard requires sizeof(char) to be 1, CHAR_BIT cannot be anything other than 8, unless the architecture is redefining what 'byte' means.
The possibility for a byte to be something other than 8 bit is the reason, why some people refer to 8 bit as octet in network protocols etc.
I think I remember somebody pointing to such a machine in some special area (Telco?) still in use in a previous discussion here ... but if that still exists it's very very rare and mostly historical.
