32 byte Aligned MemoryBlock

General JUCE discussion
1

Hi. I’m in need of 32 byte aligned memory blocks.
I currently do it myself using malloc and creating more memory, then shifting the start point to the alignment point. It’s a classic way of doing it, but it’s a bit messy. I’d like to use Juce’s MemoryBlock and other arrrays to align to 32 bytes as well.
Is this possible?

2

Hi,

I am not aware of any support for alignment in juce::MemoryBlock or HeapBlock, but C++17 introduced std::aligned_alloc - that might be a bit cleaner to use than the classic way you’ve described?

3

CHOC has an aligned memory block:

3 Likes
4

Thanks for the replies guys. So there’s no way Juce memory allocations can do it? It’s a shame as any SIMD(256 bit) work crashes if it’s not aligned to 32.

5

Strangely, with c++17 or c++20 in Windows it doesn’t appear to exist yet. I could use _aligned_malloc on Windows and posix_memalign on Mac, I just wondered if there was something more universal?

I’ll stick with my own alloc’s then, it’s just weird seeing memory allocations all over my code again! :roll_eyes::grin:

6

It should be , try including cstdlib its been available since 17

7

Thanks for confirming, you’ve used it on windows LLVM clang with Visual Studio 2022?
I ask because standards aren’t always features.

8

Yeah I’m not sure exactly, but I would be suprised if it wasn’t. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/header/cstdlib.html

9

I haven’t tried it but unfortunately it does look like it really isn’t supported by MSVC

  • aligned_alloc support is missing, because of the Windows heap implementation. The alternative is to use _aligned_malloc.
3 Likes
10

Thanks for finding that. The good news is that it’s not just me. No problem really, although it would be nice to have an alignment feature included with MemoryBlock.