alt Hacker NewsI've written a lot of code using that method, and never had any portability issues. You use types with number of bits in them.
Hell, I've slung C structs across the network between 3 CPU architectures. And I didn't even use htons!
Maybe it's not portable to some ancient architecture, but none that I have experienced.
If there is undefined behavior, it's certainly never been a problem either.
And I've seen a lot of talk about TLB shootdown, so I tried to reproduce those problems but even with over 32 threads, mmap was still faster than fread into memory in the tests I ran.
Look, obviously there are use cases for libraries like that, but a lot of the time you just need something simple, and writing some structs to disk can go a long way.
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C allows most of this, whereas C++ doesn't allow pointer aliasing without a compiler flag, tricks and problems.
I agree you can certainly just use bytes of the correct sizes, but often to get the coverage you need for the data structure you end up writing some form of wrapper or fixup code, which is still easier and gives you the control versus most of the protobuf like stuff that introduces a lot of complexity and tons of code.
That seems highly unlikely. Let's assume that all compilers use the exact same padding in C structs, that all architectures use the same alignment, and that endianness is made up, that types are the same size across 64 and 32 bit platforms, and also pretend that pointers inside a struct will work fine when sent across the network; the question remains still: Why? Is THIS your bottleneck? Will a couple memcpy() operations that are likely no-op if your structs happen to line up kill your perf?
Some people also don't use protective gear when going downhill biking, it is a matter of feeling lucky.