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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!brl-adm!adm!guy%gorodish@Sun.COM
From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Byte vs. Word Alignment - (nf)
Message-ID: <7020@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 21-Apr-87 11:02:14 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.7020
Posted: Tue Apr 21 11:02:14 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Apr-87 03:21:06 EST
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
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> Byte vs. word alignment is a problem I have encountered recently when I
> tried to setup a simple server/client connection using sockets.

Yup - and I know of another machine whose padding rules are different
from both VAX and Sun (CCI 6/32 - last time I looked, which
admittedly was a while ago, it aligned structures at least on 4-byte
boundaries, as opposed the VAX PCC which aligns them to the boundary
of the most strictly aligned member and the Sun PCC which aligns them
to the more restrictive of "most strictly aligned member" and "2
bytes").

The moral of the story is "don't send raw structures over the wire if
you can possibly avoid it" (note that you couldn't have sent *raw*
structures over the wire anyway unless you had the receiving program
fix the byte order, if necessary).