3 replies to this topic

[tobeythorn]

I am trying to get some c code I developed on a mac to work on my windows machine. In the code, I defined a struct to represent each vertex, containing 4 floats for vertex position (x, y, z, w), and 4 floats for the vertex normal vector (nx, ny, nz, nw). I then made an array of these structs and cast it to an array of floats to create a striped array of vertex data for use with a vertex buffer object in OpenGL. This worked fine in xcode (which uses clang compiler?).

On my windows machine, using mingw and gcc, when I print out the cast array in the console, I get garbage. I'm guessing my assumption that the floats inside the struct would be lined up nicely in memory and without padding is wrong under certain compilers. Is there a way to make this work?

[Reedbeta]

That is bizarre. The floats should be lined up nicely in memory, without padding in gcc as well, AFAIK. Can you check the sizeof() on your struct? If it has 8 floats, it should be 32 bytes, whether on the Mac or in Windows.

[.oisyn]

Officially this is undefined behaviour. In practice, however, I can't imagine any 32 bit compiler having problems with this. Can you post how you declare the structure and how you cast it to an array of floats?

[tobeythorn]

Thanks for your suggestions. I checked the size of my structs and indeed they are correct (32 bits for 8 floats), which led me to realize that I had made a embarrassingly dumb mistake when trying to print out out the cast array for debugging. The problem I'm having instead seems to be with sending the vertices to the vertex shader, so I'll work on that.