In my time in the embedded world we would reorder fields to deal with issues like alignment in MIPS. If you wanted to avoid this you would have to use a directi

In my time in the embedded world we would reorder fields to deal with issues like alignment in MIPS. If you wanted to avoid this you would have to use a directive like __attribute__((packed)). Does go allow you do do the same? So I used to do things like this (hopefully the formatting is correct): ~/Desktop$ cat test1.c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdint.h> // Original Ordering struct stats { uint8_t NumPosts; uint16_t Reach; uint8_t NumLikes; }; // Packed struct struct stats_packed { uint8_t NumPosts; uint16_t Reach; uint8_t NumLikes; } __attribute__((packed)); // Reordered struct stats_reordered { uint8_t NumPosts; uint8_t NumLikes; uint16_t Reach; }; int main(){ printf("sizeof(struct stats) = %ld\n", sizeof(struct stats)); printf("sizeof(struct stats_packed) = %ld\n", sizeof(struct stats_packed)); printf("sizeof(struct stats_reordered) = %ld\n", sizeof(struct stats_reordered)); return 0; } ~/Desktop$ gcc test1.c && ./a.out sizeof(struct stats) = 6 sizeof(struct stats_packed) = 4 sizeof(struct stats_reordered) = 4