Work around some gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing warnings

Work around some gcc 4.4 strict-aliasing warnings

gcc 4.4 ends up generating strict-aliasing warnings about some very common
networking socket uses that do not really result in a real problem and
cannot be easily avoided with union-based type-punning due to struct
definitions including another struct in system header files. To avoid having
to fully disable strict-aliasing warnings, provide a mechanism to hide the
typecast from aliasing for now. A cleaner solution will hopefully be found
in the future to handle these cases.