Thanks for the tip --- alignas slipped my mind. The compiler I use for most of my work doesn't yet support alignas (or unrestricted unions). I believe a VC++-specific equivalent would for the former trick would be __declspec(align(__alignof(T))).
Yeah, you are right, alignas is still unsupported in many compilers. clang 3.2 supports it. However, unrestricted unions has been supported in many compilers for a long time now. I would use that in this case, since you already know the type 'T'.
