https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95052
--- Comment #2 from Krzysztof Nowicki <krzysztof.a.nowicki+gcc at gmail dot com> --- (In reply to Richard Biener from comment #1) > I'm not sure what you describe as padding is padding. Instead it's valid to > access all elements of the array you declare and thus it must be initialized. Not in this case, as this is a constant initializer, which is anonymous and is never accessible from the code directly. > What could be done is elide zero-padding parts to a memset() call. Exactly, this is what I mean. Currently this actually happens in the generated code (see attachment), but the part of GCC which allocates the variable in the .rodata section doesn't know that and allocates memory for the full contents including the zero padding.
