Re: [boost] Endian library - request for comments

From: Sebastian Redl (sebastian.redl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-06-03 17:28:18

Thorsten Ottosen wrote:

>1. have I misunderstood aligmnet completely when I thought that a single 
>data member was not guaranteed to be aligned, but an array ways?
>(your aligned types use a data member, your unaligned use a char array).
>  
>
Every variable is aligned according to its own alignment requirements. 
Typically, a variable needs to be aligned on a boundary of its own size, 
i.e. a byte type must be byte-aligned, a word type word-aligned and so on.
An array is always aligned according to its underlying type.
Thus, to get a simple aligned type, just use a member of that type. To 
get an unaligned type, you need to allocate storage that is 
byte-aligned, and the easiest way of doing this is using a char[sizeof(T)].
I hope that answers the question as well.

Sebastian Redl