catb The Lost Art of Structure Packing
1. Who should read this
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
You need to know this technique if you intend to write code for memory-constrained embedded systems, or operating-system kernels. It is useful if you are working with application data sets so large that your programs routinely hit memory limits. It is good to know in any application where you really, really care about optimizing your use of memory bandwidth and minimizing cache-line misses.
NOTE: 在Data structure alignment中也提及了cache-line。
Finally, knowing this technique is a gateway to other esoteric C topics. You are not an advanced C programmer until you have grasped these rules. You are not a master of C until you could have written this document yourself and can criticize it intelligently.
This document originated with "C" in the title, but many of the techniques discussed here also apply to the Go language - and should generalize to any compiled language with C-like structures. There is a note discussing Go and Rust towards the end.
2. Why I wrote it
This webpage exists because in late 2013 I found myself heavily applying an optimization technique that I had learned more than two decades previously and not used much since.
NOTE : 这个网页的存在是因为在2013年末我发现自己大量应用了一种优化技术，这种技术是我在二十多年前学到的并且从那时起就没用过多少。
I needed to reduce the memory footprint of a program that used thousands - sometimes hundreds of thousands - of C struct instances. The program was cvs-fast-export and the problem was that it was dying with out-of-memory errors on large repositories.
NOTE : out-of-memory的意思是内存不足，参见Out of memory。
There are ways to reduce memory usage significantly in situations like this, by rearranging the order of structure members in careful ways. This can lead to dramatic gains - in my case I was able to cut the working-set size by around 40%, enabling the program to handle much larger repositories without dying.
But as I worked, and thought about what I was doing, it began to dawn on me that the technique I was using has been more than half forgotten in these latter days. A little web research confirmed that programmers don’t seem to talk about it much any more, at least not where a search engine can see them. A couple of Wikipedia entries touch the topic, but I found nobody who covered it comprehensively.
There are actually reasons for this that aren’t stupid. CS courses (rightly) steer people away from micro-optimization towards finding better algorithms. The plunging price of machine resources has made squeezing memory usage less necessary. And the way hackers used to learn how to do it back in the day was by bumping their noses on strange hardware architectures - a less common experience now.
But the technique still has value in important situations, and will as long as memory is finite. This document is intended to save programmers from having to rediscover the technique, so they can concentrate effort on more important things.
NOTE : 实际上有些原因并不是愚蠢的。 CS课程（正确地）引导人们远离微观优化，寻找更好的算法。 机器资源的价格暴跌使得减少内存使用的必要性降低。 黑客过去常常学习如何做到这一点的方式是在奇怪的硬件架构上嗤之以鼻 - 现在这种不太常见的体验。
但是这种技术在重要情况下仍然具有价值，并且只要存储器是有限的。 本文档旨在帮助程序员不必重新发现该技术，因此他们可以将精力集中在更重要的事情上。
3. Alignment requirements
The first thing to understand is that, on modern processors, the way your compiler lays out basic datatypes in memory is constrained in order to make memory accesses faster. Our examples are in C, but any compiled language generates code under the same constraints.
Storage for the basic C datatypes on an x86 or ARM processor doesn’t normally start at arbitrary byte addresses in memory. Rather, each type except char has an alignment requirement; chars can start on any byte address, but 2-byte shorts must start on an even address, 4-byte ints or floats must start on an address divisible by 4, and 8-byte longs or doubles must start on an address divisible by 8. Signed or unsigned makes no difference.
The jargon(行话) for this is that basic C types on x86 and ARM are self-aligned. Pointers, whether 32-bit (4-byte) or 64-bit (8-byte) are self-aligned too.
NOTE : 不同类型的align requirement其实就等于
sizeof
Self-alignment makes access faster because it facilitates generating single-instruction fetches and puts of the typed data. Without alignment constraints, on the other hand, the code might end up having to do two or more accesses spanning（跨越） machine-word boundaries. Characters are a special case; they’re equally expensive from anywhere they live inside a single machine word. That’s why they don’t have a preferred alignment.
NOTE : 最后一段话的意思是：对于
char类型的数据，它们并没有preferred alignment，因为无论它们位于何处，被access的时候所需的耗费是相同的；NOTE : 在这篇文章中，描述了CPU 进行memory access的方式：Data alignment: Straighten up and fly right，下面这个图片是取自这篇文章：
Figure 2. How processors see memory
I said "on modern processors" because on some older ones forcing your C program to violate alignment rules (say, by casting an odd（奇数） address into an int pointer and trying to use it) didn’t just slow your code down, it caused an illegal instruction fault. This was the behavior, for example, on Sun SPARC chips. In fact, with sufficient determination and the right (e18) hardware flag set on the processor, you can still trigger this on x86.
THINKING : 在什么情况下，会出现violate alignment rules？
- 下面这篇文章中所列出的是一种情况
- Should I worry about the alignment during pointer casting? 这篇文章中所介绍的和下面链接中的情况非常类似
NOTE : 关于illegal instruction fault在Unaligned accesses in C/C++: what, why and solutions to do it properly中介绍了。
Also, self-alignment is not the only possible rule. Historically, some processors (especially those lacking barrel shifters) have had more restrictive ones. If you do embedded systems, you might trip over one of these lurking in the underbrush. Be aware this is possible.
From when it was first written at the beginning of 2014 until late 2016, this section ended with the last paragraph. During that period I’ve learned something rather reassuring（使放心） from working with the source code for the reference implementation of NTP. It does packet analysis by reading packets off the wire directly into memory that the rest of the code sees as a struct, relying on the assumption of minimal self-aligned padding.
NOTE : NTP参见Network Time Protocol。
The interesting news is that NTP has apparently being getting away with this for *decades* across a very wide span of hardware, operating systems, and compilers, including not just Unixes but under Windows variants as well. This suggests that platforms with padding rules other than self-alignment are either nonexistent or confined to such specialized niches that they’re never either NTP servers or clients.
4. Padding
Now we’ll look at a simple example of variable layout in memory. Consider the following series of variable declarations in the top level of a C module:
char *p;
char c;
int x;
If you didn’t know anything about data alignment, you might assume that these three variables would occupy a continuous span of bytes in memory. That is, on a 32-bit machine 4 bytes of pointer would be immediately followed by 1 byte of char and that immediately followed by 4 bytes of int. And a 64-bit machine would be different only in that the pointer would be 8 bytes.
In fact, the hidden assumption that the allocated order of static variables is their source order is not necessarily valid; the C standards don’t mandate it. I’m going to ignore this detail because (a) that hidden assumption is usually correct anyway, and (b) the actual purpose of talking about padding and packing outside structures is to prepare you for what happens inside them.
NOTE : 对于C standard并没有强制要求的标志我们是不能够依赖它的， 比如这里所述的：the allocated order of static variables is their source order；因为我们的source code其实并不总是符合编译器所认为的最优原则的，比如说上面的代码，显然它会造成3 bytes gap。其实编译器是完全可以进行优化来将这3 byte给去除的；
Here’s what actually happens (on an x86 or ARM or anything else with self-aligned types). The storage for p starts on a self-aligned 4- or 8-byte boundary depending on the machine word size. This is pointer alignment - the strictest possible.
NOTE : 上面这段话其实是比较模糊的，按照前面的推理：alignment 等于
sizeof，那么pointer alignment就等于它的sizeof；上面这段话中说，pointer alignment取决于machine word size，那这说明pointer alignement和machine word size之间是存在着非常大的关联的，那到底是什么关联呢？是pointer alignment等于machine word size吗？这引发了我的思考：What is the size of a pointer? 按照我之前的想法：指针的大小必须能够保证它能够访问到这个内存空间，这说明指针类型的长度和内存空间的大小是存在着关联的；
这篇文章也比较好：C语言指针的长度和类型
The storage for c follows immediately. But the 4-byte alignment requirement of x forces a gap in the layout; it comes out as though there were a fourth intervening variable, like this:
char *p; /* 4 or 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad[3]; /* 3 bytes */
int x; /* 4 bytes */
The pad[3] character array represents the fact that there are three bytes of waste space in the structure. The old-school term for this was "slop". The value of the padding bits is undefined; in particular it is not guaranteed that they will be zeroed.
Compare what happens if x is a 2-byte short:
char *p;
char c;
short x;
In that case, the actual layout will be this:
char *p; /* 4 or 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad[1]; /* 1 byte */
short x; /* 2 bytes */
On the other hand, if x is a long on a 64-bit machine
char *p;
char c;
long x;
we end up with this:
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte
char pad[7]; /* 7 bytes */
long x; /* 8 bytes */
If you have been following carefully, you are probably now wondering about the case where the shorter variable declaration comes first:
char c;
char *p;
int x;
If the actual memory layout were written like this
char c;
char pad1[M];
char *p;
char pad2[N];
int x;
what can we say about M and N?
First, in this case N will be zero. The address of x, coming right after p, is guaranteed to be pointer-aligned, which is never less strict than int-aligned.
NOTE : 因为这些align的值都是2的幂，所以它们之间存在着倍数的关系；
The value of M is less predictable. If the compiler happened to map c to the last byte of a machine word, the next byte (the first of p) would be the first byte of the next one and properly pointer-aligned. M would be zero.
It is more likely that c will be mapped to the first byte of a machine word. In that case M will be whatever padding is needed to ensure that p has pointer alignment - 3 on a 32-bit machine, 7 on a 64-bit machine.
Intermediate cases are possible. M can be anything from 0 to 7 (0 to 3 on 32-bit) because a char can start on any byte boundary in a machine word.
If you wanted to make those variables take up less space, you could get that effect by swapping x with c in the original sequence.
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
long x; /* 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte
Usually, for the small number of scalar variables in your C programs, bumming out the few bytes you can get by changing the order of declaration won’t save you enough to be significant. The technique becomes more interesting when applied to nonscalar variables - especially structs.
Before we get to those, let’s dispose of arrays of scalars. On a platform with self-aligned types, arrays of char/short/int/long/pointer have no internal padding; each member is automatically self-aligned at the end of the next one.
All these rules and examples map over to Go with only syntactic changes.
In the next section we will see that the same is *not* necessarily true of structure arrays.
5. Structure alignment and padding
In general, a struct instance will have the alignment of its widest scalar member. Compilers do this as the easiest way to ensure that all the members are self-aligned for fast access.
Also, in C (and Go, and Rust) the address of a struct is the same as the address of its first member - there is no leading padding. Beware: in C++, classes that look like structs may break this rule! (Whether they do or not depends on how base classes and virtual member functions are implemented, and varies by compiler.)
(When you’re in doubt about this sort of thing, ANSI C provides an offsetof() macro which can be used to read out structure member offsets.)
Consider this struct:
struct foo1 {
char *p;
char c;
long x;
};
Assuming a 64-bit machine, any instance of struct foo1 will have 8-byte alignment. The memory layout of one of these looks unsurprising, like this:
struct foo1 {
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte
char pad[7]; /* 7 bytes */
long x; /* 8 bytes */
};
It’s laid out exactly as though variables of these types has been separately declared. But if we put c first, that’s no longer true.
struct foo2 {
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad[7]; /* 7 bytes */
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
long x; /* 8 bytes */
};
If the members were separate variables, c could start at any byte boundary and the size of pad might vary. Because struct foo2 has the pointer alignment of its widest member, that’s no longer possible. Now c has to be pointer-aligned, and following padding of 7 bytes is locked in.
NOTE : 这段话给出了上述两种方式之间的差异所在；
Now let’s talk about trailing padding on structures. To explain this, I need to introduce a basic concept which I’ll call the stride address of a structure. It is the first address following the structure data that has the same alignment as the structure.
The general rule of trailing structure padding is this: the compiler will behave as though the structure has trailing padding out to its stride address. This rule controls what sizeof() will return.
Consider this example on a 64-bit x86 or ARM machine:
struct foo3 {
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
};
struct foo3 singleton;
struct foo3 quad[4];
You might think that sizeof(struct foo3) should be 9, but it’s actually 16. The stride address is that of (&p)[2]. Thus, in the quad array, each member has 7 bytes of trailing padding, because the first member of each following struct wants to be self-aligned on an 8-byte boundary. The memory layout is as though the structure had been declared like this:
struct foo3 {
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad[7];
};
For contrast, consider the following example:
struct foo4 {
short s; /* 2 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
};
Because s only needs to be 2-byte aligned, the stride address is just one byte after c, and struct foo4 as a whole only needs one byte of trailing padding. It will be laid out like this:
struct foo4 {
short s; /* 2 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad[1];
};
and sizeof(struct foo4) will return 4.
Here’s a last important detail: If your structure has structure members, the inner structs want to have the alignment of longest scalar too. Suppose you write this:
struct foo5 {
char c;
struct foo5_inner {
char *p;
short x;
} inner;
};
The char *p member in the inner struct forces the outer struct to be pointer-aligned as well as the inner. Actual layout will be like this on a 64-bit machine:
struct foo5 {
char c; /* 1 byte*/
char pad1[7]; /* 7 bytes */
struct foo5_inner {
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
short x; /* 2 bytes */
char pad2[6]; /* 6 bytes */
} inner;
};
This structure gives us a hint of the savings that might be possible from repacking structures. Of 24 bytes, 13 of them are padding. That’s more than 50% waste space!
6. Bitfields
Now let’s consider C bitfields. What they give you the ability to do is declare structure fields of smaller than character width, down to 1 bit, like this:
struct foo6 {
short s;
char c;
int flip:1;
int nybble:4;
int septet:7;
};
The thing to know about bitfields is that they are implemented with word- and byte-level mask and rotate instructions operating on machine words, and cannot cross word boundaries. C99 guarentees that bit-fields will be packed as tightly as possible, provided they don’t cross storage unit boundaries (6.7.2.1 #10).
This restriction is relaxed in C11 (6.7.2.1p11) and C++14 ([class.bit]p1); these revisions do not actually require struct foo9 to be 64 bits instead of 32; a bit-field can span multiple allocation units instead of starting a new one. It’s up to the implementation to decide; GCC leaves it up to the ABI, which for x64 does prevent them from sharing an allocation unit.
Assuming we’re on a 32-bit machine, the C99 rules imply that the layout may look like this:
struct foo6 {
short s; /* 2 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
int flip:1; /* total 1 bit */
int nybble:4; /* total 5 bits */
int pad1:3; /* pad to an 8-bit boundary */
int septet:7; /* 7 bits */
int pad2:25; /* pad to 32 bits */
};
But this isn’t the only possibility, because the C standard does not specify that bits are allocated low-to-high. So the layout could look like this:
struct foo6 {
short s; /* 2 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
int pad1:3; /* pad to an 8-bit boundary */
int flip:1; /* total 1 bit */
int nybble:4; /* total 5 bits */
int pad2:25; /* pad to 32 bits */
int septet:7; /* 7 bits */
};
That is, the padding could precede rather than following the payload bits.
Note also that, as with normal structure padding, the padding bits are not guaranteed to be zero; C99 mentions this.
Note that the base type of a bit field is interpreted for signedness but not necessarily for size. It is up to implementors whether "short flip:1" or "long flip:1" are supported, and whether those base types change the size of the storage unit the field is packed into.
Proceed with caution and check with -Wpadded if you have it available (e.g. under clang). Compilers on exotic hardware might interpret the C99 rules in surprising ways; older compilers might not quite follow them.
The restriction that bitfields cannot cross machine word boundaries means that, while the first two of the following structures pack into one and two 32-bit words as you’d expect, the third (struct foo9) takes up *three* 32-bit words in C99, in the last of which only one bit is used.
struct foo7 {
int bigfield:31; /* 32-bit word 1 begins */
int littlefield:1;
};
struct foo8 {
int bigfield1:31; /* 32-bit word 1 begins /*
int littlefield1:1;
int bigfield2:31; /* 32-bit word 2 begins */
int littlefield2:1;
};
struct foo9 {
int bigfield1:31; /* 32-bit word 1 begins */
int bigfield2:31; /* 32-bit word 2 begins */
int littlefield1:1;
int littlefield2:1; /* 32-bit word 3 begins */
};
Again, C11 and C++14 may pack foo9 tighter, but it would perhaps be unwise to count on this.
On the other hand, struct foo8 would fit into a single 64-bit word if the machine has those.
7. Structure reordering
Now that you know how and why compilers insert padding in and after your structures we’ll examine what you can do to squeeze out the slop. This is the art of structure packing.
The first thing to notice is that slop only happens in two places. One is where storage bound to a larger data type (with stricter alignment requirements) follows storage bound to a smaller one. The other is where a struct naturally ends before its stride address, requiring padding so the next one will be properly aligned.
The simplest way to eliminate slop is to reorder the structure members by decreasing alignment. That is: make all the pointer-aligned subfields come first, because on a 64-bit machine they will be 8 bytes. Then the 4-byte ints; then the 2-byte shorts; then the character fields.
So, for example, consider this simple linked-list structure:
struct foo10 {
char c;
struct foo10 *p;
short x;
};
With the implied slop made explicit, here it is:
struct foo10 {
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad1[7]; /* 7 bytes */
struct foo10 *p; /* 8 bytes */
short x; /* 2 bytes */
char pad2[6]; /* 6 bytes */
};
That’s 24 bytes. If we reorder by size, we get this:
struct foo11 {
struct foo11 *p;
short x;
char c;
};
Considering self-alignment, we see that none of the data fields need padding. This is because the stride address for a (longer) field with stricter alignment is always a validly-aligned start address for a (shorter) field with less strict requirements. All the repacked struct actually requires is trailing padding:
struct foo11 {
struct foo11 *p; /* 8 bytes */
short x; /* 2 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
char pad[5]; /* 5 bytes */
};
Our repack transformation drops the size from 24 to 16 bytes. This might not seem like a lot, but suppose you have a linked list of 200K of these? The savings add up fast - especially on memory-constrained embedded systems or in the core part of an OS kernel that has to stay resident.
Note that reordering is not guaranteed to produce savings. Applying this technique to an earlier example, struct foo5, we get this:
struct foo12 {
struct foo5 {
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
short x; /* 2 bytes */
} inner;
char c; /* 1 byte*/
};
With padding written out, this is
struct foo12 {
struct foo5 {
char *p; /* 8 bytes */
short x; /* 2 bytes */
char pad[6]; /* 6 bytes */
} inner;
char c; /* 1 byte*/
char pad[7]; /* 7 bytes */
};
It’s still 24 bytes because c cannot back into the inner struct’s trailing padding. To collect that gain you would need to redesign your data structures.
Curiously, strictly ordering your structure fields by increasing size also works to mimimize padding. You can minimize padding with any order in which (a) all fields of any one size are in a continuous span (completely eliminating padding between them), and (b) the gaps between those spans are such that the sizes on either side have as few doubling steps of difference from each other as possible. Usually this means no padding at all on one side.
Even more general minimal-padding orders are possible. Example:
struct foo13 {
int32_t i;
int32_t i2;
char octet[8];
int32_t i3;
int32_t i4;
int64_t l;
int32_t i5;
int32_t i6;
};
This struct has zero padding under self-alignment rules. Working out why is a useful exercise to develop your understanding.
Since shipping the first version of this guide I have been asked why, if reordering for minimal slop is so simple, C compilers don’t do it automatically. The answer: C is a language originally designed for writing operating systems and other code close to the hardware. Automatic reordering would interfere with a systems programmer’s ability to lay out structures that exactly match the byte and bit-level layout of memory-mapped device control blocks.
Go hews to the C philosophy and does not reorder fields. Rust makes the opposite choice; by default, its compiler may reorder structure fields.
8. Awkward scalar cases
Using enumerated types instead of #defines is a good idea, if only because symbolic debuggers have those symbols available and can show them rather than raw integers. But, while enums are guaranteed to be compatible with an integral type, the C standard does not specify which underlying integral type is to be used for them.
Be aware when repacking your structs that while enumerated-type variables are usually ints, this is compiler-dependent; they could be shorts, longs, or even chars by default. Your compiler may have a pragma or command-line option to force the size.
The long double type is a similar trouble spot. Some C platforms implement this in 80 bits, some in 128, and some of the 80-bit platforms pad it to 96 or 128 bits.
In both cases it’s best to use sizeof() to check the storage size.
Finally, under x86 Linux doubles are sometimes an exception to the self-alignment rule; an 8-byte double may require only 4-byte alignment within a struct even though standalone doubles variables have 8-byte self-alignment. This depends on compiler and options.
9. Readability and cache locality
While reordering by size is the simplest way to eliminate slop, it’s not necessarily the right thing. There are two more issues: readability and cache locality.
Programs are not just communications to a computer, they are communications to other human beings. Code readability is important even (or especially!) when the audience of the communication is only your future self.
A clumsy, mechanical reordering of your structure can harm readability. When possible, it is better to reorder fields so they remain in coherent groups with semantically related pieces of data kept close together. Ideally, the design of your structure should communicate the design of your program.
When your program frequently accesses a structure, or parts of a structure, it is helpful for performance if the accesses tend to fit within a cache line - the memory block fetched by your processor when it is told to get any single address within the block. On 64-bit x86 a cache line is 64 bytes beginning on a self-aligned address; on other platforms it is often 32 bytes.
The things you should do to preserve readability - grouping related and co-accessed data in adjacent fields - also improve cache-line locality. These are both reasons to reorder intelligently, with awareness of your code’s data-access patterns.
If your code does concurrent access to a structure from multiple threads, there’s a third issue: cache line bouncing. To minimize expensive bus traffic, you should arrange your data so that reads come from one cache line and writes go to another in your tighter loops.
And yes, this sometimes contradicts the previous guidance about grouping related data in the same cache-line-sized block. Multithreading is hard. Cache-line bouncing and other multithread optimization issues are very advanced topics which deserve an entire tutorial of their own. The best I can do here is make you aware that these issues exist.
10. Other packing techniques
Reordering works best when combined with other techniques for slimming your structures. If you have several boolean flags in a struct, for example, consider reducing them to 1-bit bitfields and packing them into a place in the structure that would otherwise be slop.
You’ll take a small access-time penalty for this - but if it squeezes the working set enough smaller, that penalty will be swamped by your gains from avoided cache misses.
More generally, look for ways to shorten data field sizes. In cvs-fast-export, for example, one squeeze I applied was to use the knowledge that RCS and CVS repositories didn’t exist before 1982. I dropped a 64-bit Unix time_t (zero date at the beginning of 1970) for a 32-bit time offset from 1982-01-01T00:00:00; this will cover dates to 2118. (Note: if you pull a trick like this, do a bounds check whenever you set the field to prevent nasty bugs!)
Each such field shortening not only decreases the explicit size of your structure, it may remove slop and/or create additional opportunities for gains from field reordering. Virtuous cascades of such effects are not very hard to trigger.
The riskiest form of packing is to use unions. If you know that certain fields in your structure are never used in combination with certain other fields, consider using a union to make them share storage. But be extra careful and verify your work with regression testing, because if your lifetime analysis is even slightly wrong you will get bugs ranging from crashes to (much worse) subtle data corruption.
11. Overriding alignment rules
Sometimes you can coerce your compiler into not using the processor’s normal alignment rules by using a pragma, usually #pragma pack. GCC and clang have an attribute**packed you can attach to individual structure declarations; GCC has an -fpack-struct option for entire compilations.
Do not do this casually, as it forces the generation of more expensive and slower code. Usually you can save as much memory, or almost as much, with the techniques I describe here.
The only good reason for #pragma pack is if you have to exactly match your C data layout to some kind of bit-level hardware or protocol requirement, like a memory-mapped hardware port, and violating normal alignment is required for that to work. If you’re in that situation, and you don’t already know everything else I’m writing about here, you’re in deep trouble and I wish you luck.
12. Tools
The clang compiler has a -Wpadded option that causes it to generate messages about alignment holes and padding. Some versions also have an undocumented -fdump-record-layouts option that yields more information.
If you’re using C11, you can deploy static_assert to check your assumptions about type and structure sizes. Example:
#include <assert.h>
struct foo4 {
short s; /* 2 bytes */
char c; /* 1 byte */
};
static_assert(sizeof(struct foo4) == 4, “Check your assumptions");
I have not used it myself, but several respondents speak well of a program called pahole. This tool cooperates with a compiler to produce reports on your structures that describe padding, alignment, and cache line boundaries. This was at one time a standalone C program, but that is now unmaintained; s script with the name pahole now ships with gdb and that is what you should use.
I’ve received a report that a proprietary code auditing tool called "PVS Studio" can detect structure-packing opportunities.
13. Proof and exceptional cases
You can download sourcecode for a little program that demonstrates the assertions about scalar and structure sizes made above. It is packtest.c.
If you look through enough strange combinations of compilers, options, and unusual hardware, you will find exceptions to some of the rules I have described. They get more common as you go back in time to older processor designs.
The next level beyond knowing these rules is knowing how and when to expect that they will be broken. In the years when I learned them (the early 1980s) we spoke of people who didn’t get this as victims of "all-the-world’s-a-VAX syndrome". Remember that not all the world is a PC.
14. Go and Rust
The Go language is in many respects similar to C. It has structures and arrays, though not bitfields or unions. Go compilers have the same optimization and alignment issues as C compilers. One important difference is that the Go specification *requires* structure fields to be self-aligned. As in C, array elements are padded up to the following stride address.
Therefore, if you know the implications of self-aligment in C, you can apply them directly to calculating sizes and offsets in Go and to space-optimizing Go structures. The obvious correspondence mostly works.
I say "mostly" because Go has one odd quirk. Since Go 1.5, a zero-length field at the end of a struct (that is, a zero-length array or empty struct) is sized and aligned as though it is one byte. The reasons for this are discussed in an essay Padding is Hard by one of the Go developers.
Rust follows C-like field alignment rules if a structure is annotated with "repr(C)". Otherwise (by default) all bets are off: padding rules are (deliberately) unspecified and the compiler may even reorder structure members. It is probably best to let the Rust compiler do space optimization rather than forcing it.
15. Supporting this work
If you were educated or entertained by this document, please sign up for my Patreon feed. The time needed to write and maintain documents like this one is not free, and while I enjoying giving them to the world my bills won’t pay themselves. Even a few dollars a month - from enough of you - helps a lot.
16. Related Reading
This section exists to collect pointers to essays which I judge to be good companions to this one.
A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++