Re: Layout of Structs

jac> It is a Good Thing [tm] that structures are laid out in this way. As
jac> a hardware type, I often need to write device drivers. Being able to
jac> impose a structure onto a hardware memory map is a very useful thing,
jac> indeed.


henry@zoo.toronto.edu
> Beware, however, that it is still possible for C structures to have
> unnamed holes in them more or less wherever the compiler pleases. C
> does *not* give you complete control of storage layout, and never has,
> although in many compilers you can do pretty much what you want at the
> price of having your code depend on assumptions about the compiler.


> Case in point: on a 68020, are longs 16-bit aligned or 32-bit aligned?
> Compilers differ.


The 68020 has a 32 bit data path. One would assume (hope?) that the compiler
would be smart enough to lay out the long on a 32 bit boundry to prevent
the additional bus cycle.


The Bible is unclear on this point; it states
"Each non-field member of a structure begins on an addressing
boundry appropriate to its type; therefore there may be unnamed
holes in a structure." (Page 196, first edition.)


This makes sense if one did:
struct foo {
char xx;
int yy;
};
One would expect yy to be long aligned, and thereby induce 3 invisible chars
into the structure.


I've never had a problem casting a hardware address into a struct declared
in the appropriate way. Naturally, I use 8-bit-byte hardware so I haven't
run into too much weirdness. This is not to say that problems don't exist;
just that implementors do the expected thing. As Henry says, this is not a
good thing to rely on. Does ANSI C address the issue of alignment?


Jonathan A. Chandross
Internet: jac@paul.rutgers.edu
UUCP: rutgers!paul.rutgers.edu!jac
[Henry's point is that on 680x0 implementations with 16-bit buses, there is
no performance advantage to 32 rather than 16 bit alignment, and for a long
time those were the bulk of 680x0 systems, hence many compilers did and still
do only 16-bit align. I am unaware of any portable way to be sure that
structures don't have holes. -John]
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