* Doug McIlroy via Gcc:
> What was the rationale for the gcc ABI convention that int
> bit fields force the containing struct to be int-aligned?
>
> For example, the size of struct{int x:2;} is 4 in Linux
> gcc, completely wasting 3 out of every 4 bytes of memory.
I'm pretty sure that this follows from the struct alignment rules in the
relevant ABIs, which do not treat bitfield members differently from
non-bitfield members.
> One can get finer alignment by declaring small fields
> to be char, but this is non-portable because char bit
> fields are an optional feature of the C standard.
And the ABIs need to support compilers which support int bit fields
only.
Thanks,
Florian
