Dict parsing question

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 16 Dec 2023 at 10:03:26 +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> It seems to me that having aligned fields within wire protocols is just
> a recipe for adding to the confusion. Is there really a measurable
> performance improvement from keeping things aligned?

If it was 20 years ago and we were designing D-Bus as a new protocol, this
would be a valid question to be asking, and I don't know what the answer
would be. In 2024, the answer is that it no longer matters whether this
is a useful optimization or not, because D-Bus' most important feature
is interoperability with D-Bus, and the spec says fields are aligned in
a particular way, therefore they're aligned in that way.

(I didn't design the wire protocol, I just inherited it.)

    smcv