Is the size of a struct required to be an exact multiple of the alignment of that struct?

Question

Once again, I\'m questioning a longstanding belief.

Until today, I believed that the alignment of the following struct would normally be 4 and the size would normall

Answer 1

I am unsure if this is in the actual C/C++ standard, and I am inclined to say that it is up to the compiler (just to be on the safe side). However, I had a "fun" time figuring that out a few months ago, where I had to send dynamically generated C structs as byte arrays across a network as part of a protocol, to communicate with a chip. The alignment and size of all the structs had to be consistent with the structs in the code running on the chip, which was compiled with a variant of GCC for the MIPS architecture. I'll attempt to give the algorithm, and it should apply to all variants of gcc (and hopefully most other compilers).

All base types, like char, short and int align to their size, and they align to the next available position, regardless of the alignment of the parent. And to answer the original question, yes the total size is a multiple of the alignment.

// size 8
struct {
    char A; //byte 0
    char B; //byte 1
    int C; //byte 4
};

Even though the alignment of the struct is 4 bytes, the chars are still packed as close as possible.

The alignment of a struct is equal to the largest alignment of its members.

Example:

//size 4, but alignment is 2!
struct foo {
    char A; //byte 0
    char B; //byte 1
    short C; //byte 3
}

//size 6
struct bar {
    char A;         //byte 0
    struct foo B;   //byte 2
}

This also applies to unions, and in a curious way. The size of a union can be larger than any of the sizes of its members, simply due to alignment:

//size 3, alignment 1
struct foo {
    char A; //byte 0
    char B; //byte 1
    char C; //byte 2
};

//size 2, alignment 2
struct bar {
    short A; //byte 0
};

//size 4! alignment 2
union foobar {
    struct foo A;
    struct bar B;
}

Using these simple rules, you should be able to figure out the alignment/size of any horribly nested union/struct you come across. This is all from memory, so if I have missed a corner case that can't be decided from these rules please let me know!