Add support for unknow legnth of vector about flatbuffers HOT 3 CLOSED

The problem with this is alignment, i.e. if you write arrays of bytes or shorts, you'll need to pre-align using the number of elements, to ensure it will match with the length field. I could simply shift the array at the end, but that could be costly. One thing we can do is to remove the need to specify the number of elements for all types with alignment >=4

from flatbuffers.

What the problem with alignment and why it is needed? Could you please explain it to me with example if possible. I saw it in the code but did not have time to fully analyse its role and i did not understand why it is there.

from flatbuffers.

Imagine you write an unknown amount of shorts, and that number ends up being 3. That is 6 bytes of data. Now you want to write the length field, which is an int, and needs to be 4-byte aligned. You must now write 2 padding bytes between the array data and the length field, causing the array data to not be adjacent to the length field. startVector takes care of that by aligning all the data before you write the array data.

from flatbuffers.