ARM has unaligned access since v6 (introduced in 2001); if you're on linux, unaligned access will be patched by the kernel (as was the case prior ARMv6 and even

ARM has unaligned access since v6 (introduced in 2001); if you're on linux, unaligned access will be patched by the kernel (as was the case prior ARMv6 and even for MIPS afaik). Anyway, the point of his post was about possible gains from removing validation, not about being portable or production code.