It used to be the case that Arm could not handle unaligned loads, but that functionality was added in v6 of the architecture (many years ago now) and so is pres

It used to be the case that Arm could not handle unaligned loads, but that functionality was added in v6 of the architecture (many years ago now) and so is present in most Arm cores around today including all the 64-bit ones. (Some instructions insist on aligned data, like atomic read-modify-write operations and some types of SIMD insn, but x86 has a few needs-alignment special cases too. Basic "just load/store data" insns that the compiler will emit are fine.)