sync: need a way to guarantee that WaitGroup.state1 fields are always 4-bytes aligned

[zigo101]

I have noticed and am glad that the suggestion mentioned in #19149 is adopted. But I feel the current new implementation is still not perfect.

The current implementation assumes that the WaitGroup.state1 field is always 4-bytes aligned, but I can't find any such guarantee is written down in any official Go documentation.

So I suggest that we should add a method like the following for *WaitGroup. The method will never be called, it just gives compilers a hint that the WaitGroup.state1 field needs to be 4-bytes aligned.

func (wg *WaitGroup) _() {
	_ = atomic.LoadUint32(&wg.state1[0])
}

[ianlancetaylor]

I don't mind adding a compiler hint but I would prefer it to be one that the compiler might actually recognize. I think it's unlikely that the compiler will ever recognize your suggestion.

Note that it's more or less OK for the standard library to assume behavior that is not guaranteed, because if the behavior changes, the standard library can change at the same time. This is not true for packages outside the standard library.

[randall77]

WaitGroup.state1 is a [3]uint32. It will be 4-byte aligned on all platforms we support.
It's not guaranteed as we don't talk about alignment in the spec. But we align all Go data types to their natural alignment up to a platform-specific maximum alignment, which is at least 4 on all platforms. It is very likely to remain at least 4 because pointers need to be aligned (to avoid shearing pointers).

[zigo101]

I understand the facts. I just want to make it perfect in theory. :)
Consider there is a third-party compiler which is neither gc or gccgo, ...

[CAFxX]

Can't this be solved simply by adding a test that will make all.bash fail if the field doesn't have the expected alignment?

[ianlancetaylor]

@CAFxX A sync.WaitGroup can appear in user code that all.bash will never see, but it still has to be aligned correctly.

[zigo101]

Closed, for WaitGroup aligns fields by using atomic.Uint64 /