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I was wondering if it was a good idea to load/save an array of a certain type of structure using fstream. Note, I am talking about loading/saving to a binary file. Should I be loading/saving independent variables such as int, float, boolean rather then a struct? The reason I ask that is because I’ve heard that a structure might have some type of padding which might offset the save/load.
A structure may contain padding, which will be written to the file. This is no big deal if the file is going to be read back on the same platform, using code emitted by the same compiler that did the write. However, this is difficult to guarantee, and if you cannot guarantee it, you should normally write the data in some textual format, such as XML, json or whatever.