[amluto]

Even some much simpler things are extremely half baked. For example, here’s one I encountered recently:

    alignas(16) char buf[128];

What type is buf? What alignment does that type have? What alignment does buf have? Does the standard even say that alignof(buf) is a valid expression? The answers barely make sense.

Given that this is the recommended replacement for aligned_storage, it’s kind of embarrassing that it works so poorly. My solution is to wrap it in a struct so that at least one aligned type is involved and so that static_assert can query it.

[bluGill]

The only people who write code like that have plenty of time to understand those questions - and why the correct answer is what it is is critically important to that line of code working correctly. The vast majority of us would never write a line like that - we let the compiler care about those details. the vast majority of the time 'just use vector' is the right answer that has zero real world exceptions.

but in the rare case you need code like that be glad C++ has you covered

[amluto]

> and why the correct answer is what it is is critically important to that line of code working correctly.

> but in the rare case you need code like that be glad C++ has you covered

I strongly disagree. alignof(buf) works correctly but is a GCC extension. alignof(decltype(buf)) is 1, because alignas is a giant kludge instead of a reasonable feature. C++ only barely has me covered here.