alt Hacker News> RISC-V hardware with slow misaligned mem ops does exist to non-insignificant extent
Only U74 and P550, old RV64GC CPUs.
SiFive's RVA23 cores have fast misaligned accesses, as do all THead and SpacemiT cores.
I can't imagine that all the Tenstorrent and Ventana and so forth people doing massively OoO 8-wide cores won't also have fast misaligned accesses.
As a previous poster said: if you're targeting RVA23 then just assume misaligned is fast and if someone one day makes one that isn't then sucks to be them.
P550 is, like, what, only a year old? I suppose there has been some laughing at it at least.
Also Kendryte K230 / C908, but only on vector mem ops, which adds a whole another mess onto this.
I'd hope all the massive OoO will have fast misaligned mem ops, anything else would immediately cause infinite pain for decades.
But of course there'll be plenty of RVA23 hardware that's much smaller eventually too, once it becomes a general expectation instead of "cool thing for the very-top-end to have".
I do agree that it'd be reasonable to just assume fast misaligned ops, but for whatever reason gcc and clang just don't, and that's what we have for defaults.