Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!unmvax!pprg.unm.edu!topgun.dspo.gov!lanl!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: sizeof struct
Keywords: sizeof struct
Message-ID: <10959@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 7 Sep 89 04:15:08 GMT
References: <29722@pbhya.PacBell.COM> <7622@cg-atla.UUCP> <14529@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <14529@haddock.ima.isc.com> karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>In this particular case, the processor doesn't require any special alignment
>for the structure in question, but the implementation pads it anyway.  (As is
>its right, silly though it may be.)  It's not a bug, just a misfeature.

It's not necessarily silly.  When the first VAX C compiler was implemented,
the implementors decided to longword-align such things even though the VAX
is byte-addressable.  It made typical programs run faster on the only model
available at that time (VAX-11/780).  That was due to the operation of the
memory buffer cache.