Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> writes:
> Interesting. I've heard in some shops it is standard policy to order
> the fields in all structs by their descending sizes (making allowances
> for platform-specific variations), so as to reduce padding. Do you
> think it would be worthwhile to systematically make this kind of
> reorganization throughout the backend?
Not really. I'll go with ordering fields in a logical fashion (related
fields together) every time. But when there's no particular semantic
reason to choose one ordering over another, you might as well look at
padding concerns for a tiebreaker. In this case there isn't any
particular logical reason AFAICS to prefer whether length appears before
or after head/tail, so why not pick the more compact form?
(Note that I put a higher premium on avoiding padding in on-disk
structures. But for transient in-memory structures, it definitely
seems like a secondary consideration.)
regards, tom lane
