Comments:	Authenticated sender is <digisoft AT eis DOT net DOT au>
From:	Paul <digisoft AT eis DOT net DOT au>
To:	djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Date:	Sat, 30 Sep 1995 12:25:23 +0000
Subject:	Re: Actual sizes of structs under djgpp?
Reply-To:	digisoft AT eis DOT net DOT au

> This is definitely a newby's question, and I apologize in advance if I
> should have found the answer for myself.
> Struct 1 is a bitfield, COORD, and takes 4 bytes; OK.
> Struct 2 is two COORDS+ two UCHARS and takes 12 bytes not 10; Hmm, maybe
> structs are long-aligned.
> Struct 3 is char[13], 37 UCHAR, 2 shorts and takes 54 bytes; OK - but why?
> 54 is not long-aligned.
> I'm trying to transfer a lot of structures and their information from a
> 68000 machine to a PC and it would help if there was some rule about length
> of structs and their components. It would also help if 86s used a rational
> byte order:-)
> Brian O'Donnell
> TCD Library
> odonnllb AT tcd DOT ie

It's much the same as on the 68000.  The 80x86 chips work better with 
the proper alignment of data structures.  Longs align on 4 byte 
boundaries, chars align on byte boundaries.  I think short's align on 
2 byte boundaries, but I havn't had occasion to check this in a long 
while.

If you design your structures with all of your longs first, then 
words and lastly bytes you should get fairly good alignment.  Of 
course there is something (maybe a pragma ??) that you can use to 
tell gcc not to optimize alignment.

Hope this helps.

Paul
+===================================================================+
Paul Coward               Whenever you find that you are on the side
digisoft AT eis DOT net DOT au       of the majority, it is time to reform.
                                                          Mark Twain

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