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In the C programming language, struct is the keyword used to define a composite, a.k.a. record, data type – a named set of values that occupy a block of memory. It allows for the different values to be accessed via a single identifier , often a pointer .
Structure of arrays (SoA) is a layout separating elements of a record (or 'struct' in the C programming language) into one parallel array per field. [1] The motivation is easier manipulation with packed SIMD instructions in most instruction set architectures, since a single SIMD register can load homogeneous data, possibly transferred by a wide internal datapath (e.g. 128-bit).
The C language specification includes the typedef s size_t and ptrdiff_t to represent memory-related quantities. Their size is defined according to the target processor's arithmetic capabilities, not the memory capabilities, such as available address space. Both of these types are defined in the <stddef.h> header (cstddef in C++).
C's offsetof() macro is an ANSI C library feature found in stddef.h. It evaluates to the offset (in bytes) of a given member within a struct or union type, an expression of type size_t . The offsetof() macro takes two parameters , the first being a structure or union name, and the second being the name of a subobject of the structure/union that ...
Although C and C++ do not allow the compiler to reorder structure members to save space, other languages might. It is also possible to tell most C and C++ compilers to "pack" the members of a structure to a certain level of alignment, e.g. "pack(2)" means align data members larger than a byte to a two-byte boundary so that any padding members ...
C calls a record a struct or structure; object-oriented languages such as Java, Smalltalk, and C++ often keep their records hidden inside objects (class instances); languages in the ML family simply call them records.
In C++, by contrast, objects are copied automatically whenever a function takes an object argument by value or returns an object by value. Additionally, due to the lack of garbage collection in C++, programs will frequently copy an object whenever the ownership and lifetime of a single shared object would be unclear.
I haven't looked at the standard you mention, but it has always been part of C that a struct is passed and returned by value. If a struct contains data occupying 1000 bytes, the compiler pushes 1000 bytes onto the stack. C programmers often pass a pointer to a struct, which is what a "pass by reference" language would do.