Use offsetof() to avoid structure alignment issues in C

Dan Saks wrote Padding and rearranging structure members; Here's what C and C++ compilers must do to keep structure members aligned, at Embedded.com recently.

No discussion of structure alignment is complete without covering offsetof() from stddef.h.

When I mentioned this to Dan he pointed me to his article on Catching errors early with compile-time assertions, where he does mention offsetof().

offsetof() gives you the offset, or the number of bytes, of a particular structure item in the C language, from the start of the structure. This makes writing safe portable code much easier with structures, as when offsetof() is used properly there are no longer worries about how different compilers might align the structure members, on machines of different word sizes.