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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. A struct can contain other data types so is used for mixed-data-type records.
A class in C++ is a user-defined type or data structure declared with any of the keywords class, struct or union (the first two are collectively referred to as non-union classes) that has data and functions (also called member variables and member functions) as its members whose access is governed by the three access specifiers private, protected or public.
^b structs in C++ are actually classes, but have default public visibility and are also POD objects. C++11 extended this further, to make classes act identically to POD objects in many more cases. ^c pair only
size_t is an unsigned integer type used to represent the size of any object (including arrays) in the particular implementation. The operator sizeof yields a value of the type size_t . The maximum size of size_t is provided via SIZE_MAX , a macro constant which is defined in the < stdint.h > header ( cstdint header in C++).
A chronic performance problem with C++03 is the costly and unneeded deep copies that can happen implicitly when objects are passed by value. To illustrate the issue, consider that an std::vector<T> is, internally, a wrapper around a C-style array with a defined size.
The sizeof operator on such a struct gives the size of the structure as if the flexible array member were empty. This may include padding added to accommodate the flexible member; the compiler is also free to re-use such padding as part of the array itself.
The compiled size of the structure is now 12 bytes. The last member is padded with the number of bytes required so that the total size of the structure should be a multiple of the largest alignment of any structure member (alignof(int) in this case, which = 4 on linux-32bit/gcc) [citation needed].
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 is not a bit field. It cannot be described as a C prototype. [1]