As discussed in Chapter 1, Product Overview, alignment of data is an important issue when porting or writing code on the Alpha platform. Depending on the particular Alpha processor platform on which your application is run, unaligned operations with primitive data types can cause poor application performance, or cause your application to fault and terminate abnormally.
This section begins by presenting an overview of alignment and packing structures. Then, it discusses the different platform defaults regarding unaligned data operation behavior, how to change those defaults, suggestions for how to avoid alignment errors, rules for alignment of complex data types, the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), and solving alignment problems.