I believe what he wants, is the usual C trick of defining a struct which represents the wire format (with all the usual caveats). Then cast a char pointer to be an instance of a pointer to that struct. Sort of like this:

    https://github.com/danos/vyatta-dataplane/blob/master/src/ecmp.c#L108-L116

Once one has to handle that sort of situation, and actually copy the data, the lack of language support for such type-punning becomes immaterial.