On Saturday, 2 September 2017 at 02:37:08 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
It's not a bug, but a feature. Data structure alignment is
important for efficient reads, so several languages (D, C, C++,
Ada, and more) will automatically pad structs so that they can
maintain specific byte alignments. On a 32-bit system, 4-byte
boundaries are the default. So a struct with 3 ubytes is going
to be padded with an extra byte at the end. Telling the
compiler to align on a 1-byte boundary (essentially disabling
alignment) will save you space, but will will generally cost
you cycles in accessing the data.
struct int24 {
ubyte[3] _payload;
}
static assert(int24.sizeof == 3);
static assert(int24.alignof == 1);
Making absolute sense. ubytes don't need any specific alignment
to be read efficiently.
