5/10    On a 32 bit architecture, if I declare something boolean or byte,
        does it still use 32 bits, or is it possible to have a different
        offset for the alignment to pack it more efficiently? ok thx.
        \_ For boolean, it's all up to your compiler.  For byte, most likely
           it's 8 bits, but it's still up to your compiler.
           \_ I heard that if the alignment isn't 32, either the arch
              would raise an off-alignment exception, or that there is
              a tremendous run-time penalty for the memory access. Is
              this true, and which architectures would this apply to?
              \_ memory alignment has nothing to do with this, since
                 you're presumably not trying to load a 32 bit word
                 from an arbitrary offset. if bool is implemented as
                 a char, then typically it's 8 bits and alignment
                 doesn't matter. x86 allows loading words from arbitrary
                 offsets, but there can be a significant performance hit,
                 whereas many mips style chips just do not allow it.
                 \_ To clarify this: the 32-bit alignment the previous poster
                    was worried about is only for 32-bit data values.  If you
                    have an 8-bit piece of data, it only needs 8-bit alignment.
              \_ The OpenBSD guys were saying that Sparc64 was their
                 preferred dev/testing arch b/c it has strict memory
                 alignment requirements; i386 less so.
              \_ On i386 or above, if you use 32-bits and it's not 32-bit
                 aligned, there is a performance penalty but no exception.
                 If you use 8 bits, I think for some instructions there is a
                 performance penalty just from using 8 bits instead of 32 bits
                 (excpet on the SX-variant processors.)  However, I think there
                 is no additional performance penalty if the 8-bit datum is not
                 32-bit aligned.
        \_ Do you mean 'bool' and 'char' in C++?  Or some other language?