Hi, Initially, I posted this question to the boost-users list, but then I was advised to repost it here. I wonder, what is the Boost community's opinion of std::launder? In particular, of its necessity when accessing an object that was created via placement-new in an aligned_storage. As I can see, it's used by Boost.Beast in its implementation of the variant type, but not in other parts of Boost. The reason I'm asking this is that I'm working on a C++14 code-base that uses Boost.Variant and Boost.Optional extensively (as well as other parts of Boost that use Variant and Optional internally). Now we're trying to switch to C++17 at least, and I worry whether it could potentially break things. To put things into context, C++ standard states in the [basic.life] section that if you had an object and then created a new one in the same location, you can use the pointer to the old object to refer to the new one only if (among other things) "the new object is of the same type as the original object (ignoring the top-level cv-qualifiers)". This means, as I understand it, that it's technically illegal to reinterpret_cast the pointer to aligned_storage to the pointer to the actual type of the object created via placement-new, because placement-new has already ended the lifetime of the aligned_storage object. So, implementations of Boost.Optional and Boost.Variant are illegal then (?). But it's been like that since C++03 and Boost worked fine all that time, so it looks like this UB existed only "on paper". But C++17 then added "Note: If these conditions are not met, a pointer to the new object can be obtained from a pointer that represents the address of its storage by calling std::launder". So now the language has the ability to deal with that UB, and a question arises, is it possible that compilers could start to use the UB to perform additional optimizations and make it a real UB? Also, I've seen a couple of times on stackoverflow.com people saying that it's actually fine to reinterpret_cast the storage in C++14, but in C++17 it's not (they didn't explain why though). So, can switching from -std=c++14 to -std=c++17 be a breaking change when using Boost? The fact that Boost.Variant and Boost.Optional don't use std::launder - is it an oversight or a conscious decision? Regards, Mikhail.