> The topic at hand is, specifically, that nobody makes cores that enforce alignment restrictions anymore. So, it doesn't matter where the pointer goes.
Compilers can rely on alignment even if the CPU doesn't. LLVM does, which is why older versions of rustc had segfaults when repr(packed) used to allow taking references. While it would be pretty easy to get rustc to stop emitting aligned loads, getting Clang and GCC to stop emitting aligned loads might be trickier. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/27060
Compilers can rely on alignment even if the CPU doesn't. LLVM does, which is why older versions of rustc had segfaults when repr(packed) used to allow taking references. While it would be pretty easy to get rustc to stop emitting aligned loads, getting Clang and GCC to stop emitting aligned loads might be trickier. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/27060