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

Structure packing suppresses structure padding, padding used when alignment matters most, packing used when space matters most.

Some compilers provide #pragma to suppress padding or to make it packed to n number of bytes. Some provide keywords to do this. Generally pragma which is used for modifying structure padding will be in the below format (depends on compiler):

#pragma pack(n)

For example ARM provides the __packed keyword to suppress structure padding. Go through your compiler manual to learn more about this.

So a packed structure is a structure without padding.

Generally packed structures will be used

• to save space

• to format a data structure to transmit over network using some protocol (this is not a good practice of course because you need to
  deal with endianness)