[pcwalton]

If your pointers have to have a bit offset, then now a pointer isn't just 1 hardware word, which would be odd to say the least for a systems language. (It would also be slow, because making a load anything other than a load is something you really don't want to do; you would lose the ability to fold into addressing modes on x86 in many cases for example.)

If some pointers have a bit offset but others don't, OK, I guess, but I'd argue that at that point it'd be a cleaner design to just have a "pointer plus bit offset" be a separate type from "regular pointer". And that would get back to the problem that you would have a type that you couldn't take a "regular" pointer to.

[manwe150]

Just to close the loop here, it looks like that is exactly what zig does for pointers, such that there is a different type of pointer for each combination of bit offsets and byte alignments, and yes it is distinct from a "regular" pointer (of which there isn't one "regular" type either, but also many separate flavors, including C-compatible, single-item, and many-item): https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#toc-packed-struct