On Wed, 07 Dec 2016 23:34:21 -0500, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

fwiw, i'm not convinced that "most protocols of the IETF follow this
mantra".  we've had multiple discussions in different protocol groups
about shaving or bloating by a few bytes here or there in different
protocols, and i don't think anyone has brought up memory alignment as
an argument in any of the discussions i've followed.

Which is sad. One would expect that this would be well understood for
decades already.

 Jiri