Data structure alignment: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:55, 25 January 2006

Revision as of 02:50, 2 March 2006

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If the type "short" is stored in two bytes of memory then each member of the data structure depicted above would be aligned to a boundary of 2 bytes. Data1 would be at offset 0, Data2 at offset 2 and Data3 at offset 4. The size of this structure after would be 6 bytes.

The type of each member of the structure usually has a required alignment, meaning that it will, unless otherwise requested by the programmer, be aligned on a pre-determined boundary. As a rule of thumb an integral data member will alignsalign to a boundary equal to its own size. The following typical requirements are valid for compilers from [[Microsoft]] and [[Borland]]:

A '''byte''' aligns to any '''byte''' boundary.<br/>