A new WG21 paper is available. A copy is linked below, and the paper will also appear in the next normal WG21 mailing. If you are not a committee member, please use the comments section below or the std-proposals forum for public discussion.

Document number: N3986

Date: 2014-04-25

Adding Standard support to avoid padding within structures

by Sebastian Davalle, Daniel Gutson, Angel Bustamante

Excerpt:

Sometimes programmers might need to avoid the bitfields’ alignment to get a compact type. Although this behavior can be obtained in most compilers by specifying the "packed" attribute, a more standard and simpler way to force it should exist (similar to the :0 syntax).