On Tuesday, 2 January 2024 08:13:17 -03 Simon McVittie wrote:
> 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.)

It was also before my time.

But I don't think this quirk was intentional. I think it was a side-effect of 
the reference implementation that wasn't properly understood at the time and 
therefore was baked in to the specification.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering