#pragma pack effect

Question

I was wondering if someone could explain to me what the #pragma pack preprocessor statement does, and more importantly, why one would want to use it.

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Answer 1

#pragma is used to send non-portable (as in this compiler only) messages to the compiler. Things like disabling certain warnings and packing structs are common reasons. Disabling specific warnings is particularly useful if you compile with the warnings as errors flag turned on.

#pragma pack specifically is used to indicate that the struct being packed should not have its members aligned. It's useful when you have a memory mapped interface to a piece of hardware and need to be able to control exactly where the different struct members point. It is notably not a good speed optimization, since most machines are much faster at dealing with aligned data.