int always 32 bits on all platforms?

[AJ]

"BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ffbc2f8cc21197db85ef2 at news.digitalmars.com...
> Hello aJ,
>
>>> In D, both type size and alignment have the same defaults on all
>>> platforms.
>>>
>> That must be some kind of magic considering that only some platforms
>> require alignment on certain (word, dword, etc.) boundaries.
>
> OK scratch alignment, I don't know what I was thinking there.
>>
>>> If desired, alignment can be explicitly controlled with the align
>>> attribute. Similarly, use of specific types control sizes.
>>>
>> Tell me, in D, can I have all the members of the following struct be
>> byte-aligned and still access and use the members directly on all
>> platforms without some kind of  "seqfault"(?):
>
> Clearly if your CPU doesn't like to unaligned reads you are going to have 
> problems with unaligned data members. In that cases you have several 
> options:
>
> 1) if you don't really care much about the offsets, let DMD do it's thing
> 2) if you must have some given offsets, force it with align and live with 
> the results because you're sunk
> 3) if you just need the same offset on a set of know systems, manually 
> find something that works and force that with align (no compiler could 
> help you here unless it know about all the system you care about)
> 4) if you just need the same offset on all system and you don't know what 
> system will be used, see 2 because you're sunk.
>

As I thought, I want hardware standardization. Save for hell freezing over, 
#3 is what I do (and catch a lot of flak for also).

>> So did I just "summarize" the extent to which guaranteed basic type
>> widths can be exploited, in that the design of ABC is always a "no no"
>> and the design of CDE is very likely to work reliably across a wide
>> range of designated platforms?
>>
>
> I'm not very up on these issues but in short, you can let DMD do it's 
> thing and get good result on any given system or you can force some 
> alignment and get binary compatibility across systems. This is the same as 
> in C. What D gives you (or takes away) is issues about int being one size 
> on one system and another size of a different system.

Understood.