Comment by pm215

Alignment requirements are and have historically been very common -- you can see them on the PDP-11, the 680x0, and so on. It's only because a few very popular architectures like x86 have had very loose or no alignment requirements that we've ended up with a lot of code that assumes there is no alignment requirement, and this has dragged other architectures down the "we need to support this" path. If your architecture faults on misaligned accesses it's really not hard to deal with -- you have to be doing something a bit odd to even run into the problem usually.