[tovej]

Yes? I agree with that. I don't really see the issue there. The computer will allocate data in aligned addresses, so you would have to be doing something weird to begin with to access unaligned pointers. And aligned access is always better anyway. I guess packed structs are a thing if you're really byte golfing. Maybe compressed network data would also make sense.

But then I would assume you are aware of unaligned pointers, and have a sane way to parse that data, rather than read individual parts of it from a raw pointer.

I am curious, what would be a legitimate reason for an unaligned pointer to int?

[simonask]

String search algorithms would be one example, where a 64-bit register can be used as a “vector” containing 8x1 bytes.

[jstimpfle]

Where is the part about unaligned pointers?

[simonask]

Strings typically consist of UTF-8 bytes, and any old `char*` pair has no alignment guarantees.

[jstimpfle]

That's true, and that's why your typical string vector code has a prelude and a postlude to do the incomplete chunks at the ends. Between the ends, it's processing larger self-aligned chunks.

[simonask]

If you're aware of that technique, why were you asking about use cases for unaligned loads?

[jstimpfle]

I'm saying that string search algorithms are _not_ a legitimate use case for unaligned loads.