Dict parsing question

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2024 11:13:17 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:

> 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 ...

The question goes back decades earlier than that. I can remember
looking at the spec for IFF (which was originally developed by
Electronic Arts for the Commodore-Amiga in 1985, and spread to other
platforms from there), which had 4-byte length fields but required them
to be 2-byte-aligned (for the sake of the 16-bit Motorola 68000
processor), and thinking how incongruous that would look once 32-bit
machines became more common.