[cairo] Re: Using bit fields a bit more in cairo

[Nicholas Miell]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:12:54 -0500, Jim Gettys wrote:

> Carl,
> 
> I'd do a bit more homework on this topic before going the bitfield
> direction in API's, though in many ways, I agree with most of the points
> you've made.
> 
> There are two places you can get bit (if you don't mind the pun):
>   o wire protocols (probably not applicable to this circumstance), where
>     you have to be careful about alignment and byte ordering.
>   o differing compilers on the same system.
> 
> Last I knew (maybe more recent C standards have "fixed" this), C did not
> define which bits get used to represent a bit field in a larger object.
> 
> The issue is, if one compiler does it one way and another does it
> differently on the same platform, you can lose when code from different
> compilers get mixed (not all platforms only use gcc...).
> 
> And I don't know if ABI conventions on platforms are clear on this
> point.
> 
> If someone has data on the current state of C compilers cross platform,
> now is the time to speak up.
>                         Regards,
>                                   - Jim

GCC has a "ms_struct" attribute which is described as controlling the
layout of packed structs and/or structs containing bitfields, so this is
likely to be an issue on Windows systems when mixing GCC and Visual C++
objects. GCC also has a -mms-bitfields option which can be used when
building on Windows.