Comment by mgaunard
2 days ago
In C, not all objects need to be their own allocated entity (like they are in other languages). They can be stored in-line within another object, which means the lifetime of that object is necessarily constrained by that of its parent.
You could make every object its own allocated entity, but then you're losing most of the benefits of using C, which is the ability to control memory layout of objects.
As any systems programming language include those that predate C by a decade, and still it doesn't allow full control without compiler extensions, if you really want full control of memory layout of objects, Assembly is the only way.
In practice C let's you control memory layout just fine. You might need to use __attribute__((packed)), which is technically non standard.
I've written hardware device drivers in pure C where you need need to peek and poke at specific bits on the memory bus. I defined a struct that matched the exact memory layout that the hardware specifies. Then cast an integer to a pointer to that struct type. At which point I could interact with the hardware by directly reading/writing fields if the struct (most of which were not even byte aligned).
It is not quite that simple, as you also have to deal with bypassing the cache, memory barriers, possibly virtual memory, finding the erreta that clarifies the originaly published register address was completely wrong. But I don't think any of that is what people mean when they say "memory layout".
Now split the struct across registers in C.
You are aware that some of those casting tricks are UB, right?
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