3 ms·

But if you don't use packed attributes, then the compiler will still add padding as necessary to avoid misalignment, while not wasting space when that's not nec

• defrost 3y ago
  The key part (for myself) of ForkMeOnTinder's comment was: > Maybe I'm a beginner then. He lists a few cases where it's not worse than sticking to 8-bit bools, but no cases where it's actually an improvement. It still wastes memory sometimes They key part of my response is sometimes "wasting memory" (to gain alignment) is a good thing. If someone, a beginner, is concerned about percieved wasted memory then of course they will use "packed". As for the guts of your comment, I agree with your sentiment but would exercise caution about expecting a compiler to do what you expect in practice - especially for cross architectural projects that are intended to be robust for a decade and more - code will be put through muliple compilers across multiple architectures and potentially many many flags will be appied that may conflict in unforseen ways with each other. In general I supported the notion of sanity check routines that double check assumptions at runtime, if you want data aligned, require data to be big endian or small endian etc then have some runtime sanity checks that can verify this for specific executables on the target platform
• junon 3y ago
  If you have three chars next to each other in a struct, there's a good chance they'll take 4 bytes of memory due to padding. 4 32-bit bools guarantee it'll take 12 at least, if not 16.