Structure Member Padding

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <17069 at haddock.ima.isc.com> karl at kelp.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>I don't get it.  Why should a half-word of internal padding be necessary or
>desirable?  Looks to me like the obvious implementation is to make it a
>two-word struct, with the first word containing s and a and b, and the second
>word containing c and three pad bytes.  What's the problem?

On many, perhaps most, word-addressed architectures there are speed advantages
to not trying to pack different small data types within the same word, unless
bit fields are explicitly requested.