size of struct in C

The compiler may add padding for alignment requirements. Note that this applies not only to padding between the fields of a struct, but also may apply to the end of the struct (so that arrays of the structure type will have each element properly aligned).

For example:

struct foo_t {
    int x;
    char c;
};

Even though the c field doesn’t need padding, the struct will generally have a sizeof(struct foo_t) == 8 (on a 32-bit system – rather a system with a 32-bit int type) because there will need to be 3 bytes of padding after the c field.

Note that the padding might not be required by the system (like x86 or Cortex M3) but compilers might still add it for performance reasons.