Structure padding and packing

Question

Consider:

struct mystruct_A
{
   char a;
   int b;
   char c;
} x;

struct mystruct_B
{
   int b;
   char a;
} y;

The sizes of the structur

Answer 1

I know this question is old and most answers here explains padding really well, but while trying to understand it myself I figured having a "visual" image of what is happening helped.

The processor reads the memory in "chunks" of a definite size (word). Say the processor word is 8 bytes long. It will look at the memory as a big row of 8 bytes building blocks. Every time it needs to get some information from the memory, it will reach one of those blocks and get it.

As seem in the image above, doesn't matter where a Char (1 byte long) is, since it will be inside one of those blocks, requiring the CPU to process only 1 word.

When we deal with data larger than one byte, like a 4 byte int or a 8 byte double, the way they are aligned in the memory makes a difference on how many words will have to be processed by the CPU. If 4-byte chunks are aligned in a way they always fit the inside of a block (memory address being a multiple of 4) only one word will have to be processed. Otherwise a chunk of 4-bytes could have part of itself on one block and part on another, requiring the processor to process 2 words to read this data.

The same applies to a 8-byte double, except now it must be in a memory address multiple of 8 to guarantee it will always be inside a block.

This considers a 8-byte word processor, but the concept applies to other sizes of words.

The padding works by filling the gaps between those data to make sure they are aligned with those blocks, thus improving the performance while reading the memory.

However, as stated on others answers, sometimes the space matters more then performance itself. Maybe you are processing lots of data on a computer that doesn't have much RAM (swap space could be used but it is MUCH slower). You could arrange the variables in the program until the least padding is done (as it was greatly exemplified in some other answers) but if that's not enough you could explicitly disable padding, which is what packing is.