"Pavan Deolasee" <pavan.deolasee@gmail.com> writes: > The MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF value is set to 8 bytes in a Windows- 32-bit > environment. I have very little knowledge about Windows, but at > the face of it, this looks strange. Any idea why is this required ?
It's not entirely unreasonable. The same thing happens on HPPA, which is nominally a 32-bit architecture but the hardware requires 8-byte alignment of doubles (and maybe int64 too, I forget). On newer Intel hardware it'd make sense to pad to avoid misaligned fetches.
Anyway, we detect this directly based on the C compiler's behavior, and you can't argue with the compiler about it. Whatever it's doing is right by definition.
Ah, that makes sense. I was confusing myself with 64-bit architectures and alignments.
