Search⌘ K
Home
Courses
Advanced Programming Techniques in C

Structures and Memory

Explore how structures store data in consecutive memory addresses and why compilers add padding for alignment. Understand memory allocation for structure members to optimize access speed and efficiency in C programming.

We'll cover the following...

How are structures stored in memory?

Structure members are stored in consecutive memory locations. The size of the structure variable is at least equal to the sum of sizes of structure elements.

Example program

See the code given below!

C
# include <stdio.h> 



int main( ) 

{	

	// Declares structure employee

	struct employee 

	{

		// Members of structure

		char name ;

		int age ; 

		float salary ; 

	} ;

	// Initalizes structure variable e1

	 struct employee e1 = { 'A', 23, 4000.50 } ; 



    // Address of structure members 							

    printf ("%u %u %u\n", &e1.name, &e1.age, &e1.salary);

    // Size of structure members

	printf ("%d %d %d\n", sizeof(e1.name), sizeof(e1.age), sizeof(e1.salary));	

	// Size of structure variable

    printf ("%d\n", sizeof(e1));



	return 0; 

}

Explanation

From the above code, you can see that elements ...