alt Hacker NewsBecause a struct might not serialize the same way from a CPU architecture to another.
The sizes of ints, the byte order and the padding can be different for instance.
Because a struct might not serialize the same way from a CPU architecture to another.
The sizes of ints, the byte order and the padding can be different for instance.
C has had fixed size int types since C99. And you've always been able to define struct layouts with perfect precision (struct padding is well defined and deterministic, and you can always use __attribute__(packed) and bit fields for manual padding).
Endianness might kill your portability in theory. but in practice, nobody uses big endian anymore. Unless you're shipping software for an IBM mainframe, little endian is portable.