C standards and committees (was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from)

[Mouse]

>> Most executables are not performance-critical enough for
>> dynamic-linker overhead to matter.  (For the few that are, or for
>> the few cases where lots are, yes, static linking can help.)
> I keep telling myself that whenever I launch Firefox after a reboot
> ...

Do you have reason to think dynamic-linker overhead is a perceptible
fraction of that delay?

>> [file formats and protocols]
> First off, the C standard mandates that the order of fields in a
> struct cannot be reordered,

Yes.  (I think this is a Bad Thing, but I can see why they did it.)

> so that just leaves padding and byte order to deal with.

And data type size.  (To pick a simple example, if your bytes are
nonets, you will have an interesting time generating an octet stream by
overlaying a struct onto a buffer.)

And alignment.  Not all protocols and file formats place every datatype
at naturally-aligned boundaries in the octet stream.

> Now, it may sound cavalier of me, but of the three compilers I use at
> work (gcc, clang, Solaris Sun Works thingy) I know how to get them to
> layout the structs exactly as I need them

Great.  ...for code that doesn't mind writing off portability to other,
including future, hardware and compilers.

I still don't see why you're citing "it works for my work environment"
as justification for "the C standard should write off anything else".

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