What do you mean "rule of thumb"? That's just an old meme making fun of how most Internet users were male. It's not about how you shouldn't mention gender.
If gender is never mentioned, maleness is assumed all the time, and then male users will not realize the abilities of their female peers.
I think something valuable is lost if everyone must present irrelevant identity information to combat false assumptions some may hold. At least for the crowd who want to primarily be associated with attributes that can be merited to their choosing.
> While you could make a big, global char[] array to back your arena, it’s technically not permitted (strict aliasing).
Aren't char pointers/arrays allowed to alias everything?
I used that technique in my programming language and its allocator. It's freestanding so I couldn't use malloc. I had to get memory from somewhere so I just statically allocated a big array of bytes. It worked perfectly but I do disable strict aliasing as a matter of course since in systems programming there's aliasing everywhere.
To do stay in the rules you could set up a void* to suitable region in a linkerscript