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The Hidden Cost of Misalignment

Let’s suppose you’re building an even smarter fishtank. You’re adding temperature and salinity sensors, logging timestamped readings to flash. The struct is your binary record format – every field at a fixed byte offset, so you can read it back on any system that knows the layout. You use fixed-width types from stdint.h and pack(1) to strip out compiler-inserted padding. This is the advice I had always received and given, and it’s correct – as far as it goes.