On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 04:38:45PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> It actually matters more for dynamic data structures, as compilers tend to
> queitly align things well for you. It's tough to get stack variables
> unaligned, but it's pretty easy to get dynamically allocated ones all messy.
At which point your code is (if I understand what we're talking about)
not ANSI conformant. But probably the only platform it's actually going to
break on is arm, where unaligned integer reads (hence also structs) rotate
in interesting and messy ways, and don't do what you expect.
[and the kernel doesn't fix anything up for you, because this will break
programs complied with older C compilers that know what the rotations should
be and take advantage of this to load 16 bit quantities with 32 bit loads]
Hmm. Rather a long rambling statement. But IIRC arm Debian ends up finding
problems that nothing else has exposed. So don't write these problems into
perl6.
Nicholas Clark
