[vlovich123]

In rust the compiler will auto-pack everything so your 1 byte mutex would be placed after any multibyte data to avoid padding.

[scottlamb]

That's typically not true due to the `Mutex<T>` design: the `T` gets padded to its alignment, then placed into the `struct Mutex` along with the signaling byte, and that struct is padded again before being put into the outer struct.

You can avoid this with a `parking_lot::Mutex<()>` or `parking_lot::RawMutex` guarding other contents, but then you need to use `unsafe` because the borrow checker doesn't understand what you're doing.

I coincidentally was discussing this elsewhere recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ky5gva/comment/mv3kp...