In general an SV consists of two parts: a head, containing some flags, a reference count and a pointer to the second part: a body, containing various type-specific fields; for example a PV body contains a size, current length and a pointer to a string.

In fact as an optimisation the head contains one extra general-purpose field, which can hold a pointer, or an IV or whatever. The presence of this field means that for "small" SVs like IVs, a body doesn't have to be allocated. In this case, the head's "pointer to body" in fact points back to itself, but possibly with a small offset to make the alignment of an IV in a body (xiv_u.xivu_iv) the same as the alignment for an IV value in the head (sv_u.svu_iv).

Dave.

In reply to Re: Understanding Devel::Peek output by dave_the_m
in thread Understanding Devel::Peek output by syphilis

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.