This bothered me for a while, but I didn't think too much about it and just
copied the existing usage pattern. But it really doesn't make sense. We expect
the compiler to align the section properly. But if it didn't align it, applying
alignment after the fact would just cause our pointer to point to the middle
of the structure. That'd be even worse than a misaligned pointer.
Similarly, when doing pointer arithmetic, p++ should really result in a value
with the appropriate alignment. This is the basic principle of C pointer
addition. So we really shouldn't try to adjust the pointer ourselves. At most,
we can assert that it is indeed aligned in tests.
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
Daan De Meyer