Hands-On System Programming with Go

Manual padding

Go makes it possible to specify padding in structs manually using the blank identifier for fields. Take the following data structure:

struct{    a int32    b int32}

This will have the following representation:

We can use the blank identifier to specify padding manually and to optimize the data structure for a 64-bit architecture:

struct{    a int32    _ int32    b int32    _ int32}

This will allow the application to store each int32 in its own memory location because the blank fields will be acting as padding: