The Daily WTF

It’s hard to do any non-trivial programming in C without having to use a struct. Structs are great! A single variable holds access to multiple pieces of data, and all the nasty details of how they’re laid out in memory are handled by the compiler.

In more modern OO languages, we take that kind of thing for granted. We’re so abstracted from the details of how memory is laid out it’s easy to forget how tricky and difficult actually managing that kind of memory layout is.

Of course, if you’re Jean-Yves R’s co-worker, letting structs manage your memory layout is beginner mode stuff.

Jean-Yves was trying to understand why a bunch of structs were taking up huge amounts of memory, relative to how much they should take. Every bit of memory mattered, as this was an embedded application. Already, these structs weren’t actually stored in RAM, but in the flash

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