Which architectures are which?
I assume you mean the dec alpha allowed atomic operations on bytes... but
your phrasing is a teeny bit unclear
On Sat, Aug 19, 2017 at 4:34 AM Florian Weimer
* Michal Terepeta:
On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 8:08 PM Carter Schonwald < carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:
One issue with packed fields is that on many architectures you can't quite do subword reads or writes. So it might not always be a win.
Could you give any examples?
Historic DEC Alpha, now long obsolete.
It is very hard to create compliant and performant implementations of Java 5, C 11 or C++ 11 on such architectures. All these languages (and their subsequent revisions) require that naturally aligned objects can be accessed independently. For example, you can't use a simple read-modify-write cycle to implement a single-byte store using word operations.
That's why such architectures really do not have a future (or even a present), except maybe in niche markets such as GPGPU (but even there, things are heading towards the de-facto standard memory model).