The article mentions that the "Go spec says the address of a struct’s fields must be naturally aligned", and seems to take for granted that is necessary for spe

The article mentions that the "Go spec says the address of a struct’s fields must be naturally aligned", and seems to take for granted that is necessary for speed. A separate question would be whether it actually helps performance. For modern x64/x86 the answer seems be to "no": http://lemire.me/blog/2012/05/31/data-alignment-for-speed-myth-or-reality/ http://lemire.me/blog/2012/05/31/data-alignment-for-speed-my... Would it make sense for the Go spec to drop the alignment requirement? I'd think that a smaller memory footprint would be the better choice, and I'd think that interoperability would be better served by allowing arbitrary alignments.