It works fine on SPARC too; you just have to know where the data is coming from.
You're right to point out that people should be cautious about this code. I'm just listing my "favorite tricks". I'm not recommending that people use integer casts as their go-to string comparison.
The string literal is (all but -- honestly I'm not sure what the standard says here) guaranteed to be aligned naturally for the platform. The thing on the left hand side is not. If it's a pointer to a heap block, you're fine. If it's a pointer to a token parsed out of string input, it can be anything.
Even architectures that support misaligned accesses can be configured to trap on them and generate unexpected fatal signals.
Sorry, I wasn't talking about the string literal; I was talking about the buffer you're comparing it to. I'm saying: yes, you're right, you have to be careful that it's aligned.
With possibly-inlined, SSE-optimized strcmp variants that compare 8 or 16 bytes of a string at a time (at least according to Valgrind), how much speed is gained these days by casting and using the standard integer comparison instructions?
