[Gibbon1]

> For starters, not all hardware platforms allow unaligned accesses at all.

Yeah and always everywhere a mistake. It was a mistake back in the 1970's and it's increasing bigger mistake as time goes on. Just like big endian and 'network order'

[saagarjha]

Not really. They’re quite convenient in many cases, and can actually be more efficient than carefully preparing aligned loads/stores.