The glam guy wanted to go all aligned so that SIMD would work, but that would break so much code that he was talked out of it.
Hint for language designers: when you design a new language, put this stuff, and multidimensional arrays, in the standard library. Multiple incompatible versions of such types is as bad for number-crunching as would be multiple incompatible string types for string manipulation. You want your standard numeric libraries to work on the standard types.
This is part of why Matlab is so successful. You don't have to worry about this stuff.
Hint for language designers: when you design a new language, put this stuff, and multidimensional arrays, in the standard library. Multiple incompatible versions of such types is as bad for number-crunching as would be multiple incompatible string types for string manipulation. You want your standard numeric libraries to work on the standard types.
This is part of why Matlab is so successful. You don't have to worry about this stuff.