Re: [kmip] Feedback on binary alignment proposal

[Jon Callas <jon@pgp.com>]

On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:02 AM, Landon Curt Noll wrote:

> Matt's idea is a reasonable compromise: to keep the tag field  
> unchanged and increase the type field size to 4 bytes.
>
> chongo () /\oo/\
>

I agree and will generalize. We just all agree that things come in 32- 
bit quantities.

The only possible revision to this would be to do some 64-bit  
alignment. I mention this because there are/were machines (Alpha being  
one) that really liked 64-bit alignment.

I am *not* suggesting making type/tag etc. be 64-bits. On such a  
machine, a pair of 32-bit quantities it fine because fetch-then-split  
is fast. The difficulty would be in an unaligned fetch or store. What  
you'd want to do would be to pad strings, bignums, etc. out to 64 bits.

I bring it up because if we do that, now is the time.

	Jon

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Jon Callas
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