🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4jajk2$17aq@mule1.mindspring.com> abell@mindspring.com (Andrew
Bell) writes:

> clamage@Eng.sun.com (Steve Clamage) wrote:
> [snip]
>
> >I assume you mean a class like
> >     class Short { short val; };
> >with non-virtual member functions added. You can't assume the size and
> >alignment of the class will be the same as its only data member, and
> >no, the standard provides no special support for this special case.
> 
> Seems like if you only have one data member and no virtual functions,
> there's no reason to arbitrarily restrict it to a greater alignment
> level, save maybe to make compiler programmer's lives (and maybe
> debugger programmer's lives) trivially easier.

I few weeks ago, I ran into a similar problem (I was wrapping a struct around a
plain character array, which unexpectely changed its alignment), and I did some
enquires on comp.std.c.

It turns out some platforms have different optimal pointer representations
depending on the alignment of what's being pointed to. Since you don't need to
define a structure before you declare a pointer to it, assuming all structures
are maximally aligned "just because they're structures" may actually result in
more efficient code on these machines.

- Wil


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