upb has traditionally returned 16-byte-aligned pointers from arena allocation. This was out of an abundance of caution, since users could theoretically be using upb arenas to allocate memory that is then used for SSE/AVX values (eg. [`__m128`](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/m128?view=msvc-170), which require 16-byte alignment.
In practice, the protobuf C++ arena has used 8-byte alignment for 8 years with no significant problems I know of arising from SSE etc.
Reducing the alignment requirement to 8 will save memory. It will also help with compatibility on 32-bit architectures where `malloc()` only returns 8-byte aligned memory. The immediate motivation is to fix the win32 build for Python protobuf.
PiperOrigin-RevId: 448331777
An enum MiniDescriptor simply encodes a set of valid `int32_t` values, so that the protobuf parser can test whether a given enum value is known or not.
The format implemented here is novel and needs to be documented. In short, the format is:
1. base92 values 0-31: 5-bit mask indicating presence or absence of the next five enum values.
2. base92 values 60-91: varint indicating skip over a region of enum values.
Negative enum values are encoded as their `uint32_t` equivalent.
PiperOrigin-RevId: 442892799
Joshua Haberman
Protobuf Team
Joshua Haberman