Why does struct alignment depend on whether a field type is primitive or user-defined?

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I think this is a bug. You are seeing the side-effect of automatic layout, it likes to align non-trivial fields to an address that’s a multiple of 8 bytes in 64-bit mode. It occurs even when you explicitly apply the [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] attribute. That is not supposed to happen.

You can see it by making the struct members public and appending test code like this:

    var test = new RefAndTwoInt32Wrappers();
    test.text = "adsf";
    test.x.x = 0x11111111;
    test.y.x = 0x22222222;
    Console.ReadLine();      // <=== Breakpoint here

When the breakpoint hits, use Debug + Windows + Memory + Memory 1. Switch to 4-byte integers and put &test in the Address field:

 0x000000E928B5DE98  0ed750e0 000000e9 11111111 00000000 22222222 00000000

0xe90ed750e0 is the string pointer on my machine (not yours). You can easily see the Int32Wrappers, with the extra 4 bytes of padding that turned the size into 24 bytes. Go back to the struct and put the string last. Repeat and you’ll see the string pointer is still first. Violating LayoutKind.Sequential, you got LayoutKind.Auto.

It is going to be difficult to convince Microsoft to fix this, it has worked this way for too long so any change is going to be breaking something. The CLR only makes an attempt to honor [StructLayout] for the managed version of a struct and make it blittable, it in general quickly gives up. Notoriously for any struct that contains a DateTime. You only get the true LayoutKind guarantee when marshaling a struct. The marshaled version certainly is 16 bytes, as Marshal.SizeOf() will tell you.

Using LayoutKind.Explicit fixes it, not what you wanted to hear.

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