[jira] [Commented] (DAFFODIL-2652) Ability to disable all alignment

["Mike Beckerle (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DAFFODIL-2652?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17500291#comment-17500291 ] 

Mike Beckerle commented on DAFFODIL-2652:
-----------------------------------------

Increased priority to blocker. If we can fix the various circular unparser deadlock regressions without this, then we can re-lower the priority of this feature, but I wanted this to be prominent in the Jira tickets for 3.3.0, as it is an important possible way to resolve the unparser deadlocks, by forcing the issue. 

> Ability to disable all alignment
> --------------------------------
>
>                 Key: DAFFODIL-2652
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DAFFODIL-2652
>             Project: Daffodil
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Front End
>            Reporter: Steve Lawrence
>            Priority: Blocker
>             Fix For: 3.3.0
>
>
> Our algorithm for determining when alignment parsers/unparsers are needed is complex and imperfect--there are simply some cases where we can not statically know if alignment will be needed or not. DAFFODIL-2626 improved some of these cases, but things like global declarations still lead to alignment ambiguities.
> This can lead to Daffodil erring on the safe side and requireing alignment parsers/unparsers, even though they may not be necessary. This can lead to additional overhead, but more importantly can lead to during unparsing that are difficult to resolve.
> The majority of file formats have very simple alignment–everything is either all byte aligned or all bit aligned. So it's safe to simply exclude all alignment checking. We don't want to do this by default, but we should allow a user to add a property or tunable that allows them to specify that they know everything is correctly aligned, even if Daffodil can't statically figure it out, and to disable all alignment checking/parsers/unparsers.



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