Re: Aligning on some odd address?

[Philipp Marek <philipp dot marek at emerion dot com>]

Hello Brian!

On Freitag, 17. April 2009, Brian Budge wrote:
> I'm trying to see if I understand correctly:  There are 1260 arrays of
> different types.  Each type is at least 16 bytes, but needn't
> necessarily be 16 byte aligned.  If each array is terminated by an
> empty (zeroed) structure, that would be 1260*16 bytes of wasted
> memory.  Now if the arrays are large this is probably a very minor
> amount of waste, but if the arrays are small, this could be a lot of
> waste.  You were using an unsigned char for your length variable,
> which makes me think that the lengths could be quite small.
The biggest array is ~500 elements long, so I'd need 9 bit - a short.

> You
> almost certainly won't gain anything by using a 1 byte length, as your
> inner structs are very unlikely to be 1 byte aligned.  Most likely
> they will be at least 4 byte aligned, so you might as well use a 4
> byte integer.  An additional benefit is that if you are iterating over
> the structure, it should be faster if a memcmp isn't needed, and a
> simple counter can just be checked.
It's not a memcmp, just a compare whether siome member of the structure == 0.

> If you put the length in front of the memory, how much space is wasted
> will depend on the size of your length (you were using char), and the
> alignment of the structs in the array.  Although I'm not sure of the
> guarantee (I haven't read the standard), I believe every sane compiler
> will layout the memory of the structs to reflect the alignment of it's
> members.
>
> So in other words, how much space you waste depends on the alignment
> of the inner structs, and the outer struct should take on the
> alignment of the maximal alignment requirement of it's members.
>
> You stand to save a small amount of space, but also to potentially
> make the code more readable and more efficient by having the length
> instead of the zeroed-struct terminator.
Well, I could try to get the "terminating" structure to have the flag at the 
first position, so I could omit the rest of the structure - which would amount 
to the same savings.

Well, some of these structures have sizes of 20 or 24 bytes; I'm not sure 
whether they are aligned on 20, 24 or even 32 bytes in memory - I'm still 
thinking various ways to save some memory.


Thank you for your answers!


Regards,

Phil