I generally wouldn't worry about that for performance reasons, though, as that wouldn't reduce the nubmer of *words* of data that get copied.
The only good reasons I can think of for using the "packed" structure are: - You're using the struct to overlay a buffer that's used in network communications, so you want exactl control over which bytes of the buffer correspond to particular members of the struct, or
- You're going to have a huge number of instances of this struct in memory, and you really need that 25% savings in memory use. (Although if you allocate heap memory for individually for each instance of the struct, you still might not get any savings in heap use. IIRC, the heap is likely to allocate a bigger chunk of memory than just 9 bytes, when you ask for a 9-byte allocation.)
Brian Budge wrote:
You could reorganize your struct so that the char is on the end. Then you could just do the memcpy with 9 bytes. However, I have a feeling that doing the full 12 byte copy may be faster... like others have said, it depends on your achitecture.
Brian
On 4/27/05, Javier Valencia <jvalencia@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks John, it was the problem, uninitialized struct.
To all: i understand now whats happening about aligned stuff, thanks!!
So what is the best way to copy a struct to a byte array without copying empty aligned spaces? I'm doing now the ugly way, just pointing to each field each time and copying to the buffer.
It's for transmition purposes.
-- Christian Convey Computer Scientist, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, RI
