It would remove the millions of casts (and the need for the GCC
-fstrict-aliasing flag for this code).

Ugh ? We don't need casts with void *, that's the whole point ... while
we would do if we used char * ...

I'm not familiar with the details of the strict-breaking-good-programs
rules also known as strict-aliasing but isn't void * supposed to alias
all ? if not, that's really stupid... But even then, I fail to see how
this would break an aliasing rule as we aren't accessing the same object
from two different types and we aren't even writing to it.

I agree.  However when making this code more generally useful,
it would be good to make it more correct at the same time, since
it will only get harder to do so later on.

I think it's perfectly correct with void * ...

Ben.