The article mentions that the &quot;Go spec says the address of a struct’s fields must be naturally aligned&quot;, and seems to take for granted that is necessary for speed.  A separate question would be whether it actually helps performance.<p>For modern x64&#x2F;x86 the answer seems be to &quot;no&quot;: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lemire.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;31&#x2F;data-alignment-for-speed-myth-or-reality&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lemire.me&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;31&#x2F;data-alignment-for-speed-my...</a><p>Would it make sense for the Go spec to drop the alignment requirement?  I&#x27;d think that a smaller memory footprint would be the better choice, and  I&#x27;d think that interoperability would be better served by allowing arbitrary alignments.