• brian@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    c++ guarantees that calls to malloc are aligned https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/c/malloc .

    you can call malloc(1) ofc, but calling malloc_usable_size(malloc(1)) is giving me 24, so it at least allocated 24 bytes for my 1, plus any tracking overhead

    yeah, as I said, in a stack frame. not surprised a compiler packed them into single bytes in the same frame (but I wouldn’t be that surprised the other way either), but the system v abi guarantees at least 4 byte alignment of a stack frame on entering a fn, so if you stored a single bool it’ll get 3+ extra bytes added on the next fn call.

    computers align things. you normally don’t have to think about it. Consider this a TIL moment.