[Joker_vD]

I've read that rationale, and it's, well, I'm not going to say it's lying, but it's insincere. By the time it was written, they already settled on 16-bit alignment, and fetching (and then decoding) 16-bit aligned 32-bit instructions is either inefficient, or hard, or requires extra circuitry (or an instruction cache).

[rwmj]

High performance RISC-V chips exist from Rivos, Ventana and others, and high performance variable length chips also exist in general (AMD, Intel). So in actual reality it increases complexity somewhat, but is not a problem.

[Joker_vD]

sighs This kind of discussion is so annoying... I start with "RISC-V's decision to make 32-bit instructions only 16-bit aligned complicates instruction fetch and decoding", and the response is "For high performance RISC-V implementations, it's a trivial matter" (which is true), I response with "But then why even bother with mostly-fixed-but-not-quite instruction length, just make a properly variable length ISA, it'd even simplify the instructions", and the reply is "the low-end implementations would struggle with decoding that efficiently" — but they already struggle with instruction fetch when they implement C extension! Nah, it's fine, the high-end chips can cope with that.

And round and around this discussion goes... Apparently, RISC-V has no downsides at any end of the price spectrum, what a marvelous ISA.

[rwmj]

If you have some specific question I may be able to answer it, since I've been involved with RISC-V for over a decade, dealt with all the main companies involved, written papers, etc. but so far I see no actual question or concrete objection.