[AlotOfReading]

Unaligned pointers are undefined behavior even when the hardware fully supports unaligned access, because you're violating the type's rules.

To be honest, I've never seen much indication that the C and C++ committees are particularly fond of each other. They sometimes coordinate, but they're mostly content letting each other evolve in different directions. C is the way it is only after a long process of evolution away from the bits and bytes of BCPL into the strictly typed language we got from ASNI.

[Gibbon1]

Undefined behavior according to WG14 but perfectly fine on most architectures. Even on architectures that don't support it (what the fuck ARM cortex) the compilers do support it.

[AlotOfReading]

Yes, that's exactly the point I've been making. It's undefined today because C has a type system and that type system has this arbitrary rule, not because there are implementation constraints necessitating it (where it could just be implementation defined instead).