Alignment guarantees of static char array

Question

I want to know the alignment guarantees of a statically allocated array of char. Looking at other SO questions, I found some concerning dynamically allocated ar

Answer 1

If you want to guarantee the alignment of the static char array, you can use the union trick.

union
{
    char buff[sizeof(T)];
    uint64_t dummy;
};

Here the alignment will be guaranteed for the largest element in the union. And of course you should wrap this nastiness away in a nice class.

Edit: better answer:

Of course you'd be even better using boost::aligned_storage or alignas for C++11.