I'm probably the only weirdo that thinks this, but if you support byte-addressing you'd better as well be happy with byte-alignment. Atomics being the only place where it's reasonable to be different.
Which brings me to padding. I wonder what percentage of memory of the average 64-bit user's system is padding? I'm afraid of the answer. The heroes of yesteryear could've coded miracles in the ignored spaces in our data.
Which brings me to padding. I wonder what percentage of memory of the average 64-bit user's system is padding? I'm afraid of the answer. The heroes of yesteryear could've coded miracles in the ignored spaces in our data.