Optimising datastructure/word alignment padding in golang

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Currently there’s no compile-time optimisation; the values are padded to 8 bytes on x64.

You can manually arrange structs to optimally utilise space; typically by going from larger types to smaller; 8 consecutive byte fields for example, will only use 8 bytes, but a single byte would be padded to an 8 byte alignment, consider this: https://play.golang.org/p/0qsgpuAHHp

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "unsafe"
)

type Compact struct {
    a, b                   uint64
    c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j byte
}

// Larger memory footprint than "Compact" - but less fields!
type Inefficient struct {
    a uint64
    b byte
    c uint64
    d byte
}

func main() {
    newCompact := new(Compact)
    fmt.Println(unsafe.Sizeof(*newCompact))
    newInefficient := new(Inefficient)
    fmt.Println(unsafe.Sizeof(*newInefficient))
}

If you take this into consideration; you can optimise the memory footprint of your structs.

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