>> Well, unaligned memory access is usually slower on all architectures :-)
>> Also, I think some ARM architectures don't support unaligned access, so
>> it's not really a thing of the past...
>
> On modern computers it's either not slower or just a tiny bit slower.
> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2012/05/31/data-alignment-for-speed-myth-or-reality/

I have other benchmarks that show slowdowns of more than 40%:
http://www.alexonlinux.com/aligned-vs-unaligned-memory-access

Also, x86 has optimized unaligned memory accesses, but the world isn't
x86-only (once again, there's ARM, and AFAICT the performance hit can
be quite high).

Now, I perfectly understand that you don't want to mess with the
implementation, but just don't say that "unaligned access doesn't
matter, and is just a tiny bit slower".

IMO the compile-time check is enough.