Data structure alignment

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (January 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Data structure alignment" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Data structure alignment is the way data is arranged and accessed in computer memory. It consists of three separate but related issues: data alignment, data structure padding, and packing.

The CPU in modern computer hardware performs reads and writes to memory most efficiently when the data is naturally aligned, which generally means that the data's memory address is a multiple of the data size. For instance, in a 32-bit architecture, the data may be aligned if the data is stored in four consecutive bytes and the first byte lies on a 4-byte boundary.

Data alignment is the aligning of elements according to their natural alignment. To ensure natural alignment, it may be necessary to insert some padding between structure elements or after the last element of a structure. For example, on a 32-bit machine, a data structure containing a 16-bit value followed by a 32-bit value could have 16 bits of padding between the 16-bit value and the 32-bit value to align the 32-bit value on a 32-bit boundary. Alternatively, one can pack the structure, omitting the padding, which may lead to slower access, but uses three quarters as much memory.

Although data structure alignment is a fundamental issue for all modern computers, many computer languages and computer language implementations handle data alignment automatically. Fortran, Ada,^[1][2] PL/I,^[3] Pascal,^[4] certain C and C++ implementations, D,^[5] Rust,^[6] C#,^[7] and assembly language allow at least partial control of data structure padding, which may be useful in certain special circumstances.