On Wed, Apr 05, 2017 at 05:03:33PM +0100, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
> > I wanted to say it behaves mostly like __attribute__((may_alias))
> > except that may_alias only has an effect on pointers and references
> > but not when accessing an object directly, (I hope you know what
> > I mean).
>
> And may_alias is not a very helpful name either.
>
> I much prefer Richi's suggestion of typeless_storage.
>
> But I'm not convinced we need the attribute at all. If a struct
> containing an array of std::byte or unsigned char has the property
> already then that's good. I don't think we need a non-portable way to
> make other types behave the same. If you can change the code to use a
> new GCC attribute then you can change the code to use an array of
> unsigned char, and be portable.
It will only work that way in C++ though, so if you want to achieve
the same in C, which doesn't have any special case for unsigned char
arrays nor std::byte, you need an attribute.
Jakub
