Purpose of Unions in C and C++

Question

I have used unions earlier comfortably; today I was alarmed when I read this post and came to know that this code

union ARGB
{
    uint32_t colour;

    str         


        

Answer 1

In C++, Boost Variant implement a safe version of the union, designed to prevent undefined behavior as much as possible.

Its performances are identical to the enum + union construct (stack allocated too etc) but it uses a template list of types instead of the enum :)