Re: [boost] Silent change in boost 1.36 alignment_of<> template with gcc 4.3

Jon Biggar wrote:

Unfortunately, this broke some code I had written that did structure introspection, because gcc's __alignof__() returns 8 for double on the x86 architecture, but actually only aligns doubles on 4 byte boundaries inside structures.

I personally never understood why gcc's alignof returns that. It doesn't even make sense, since the size of double is not a multiple of 8, so multiple doubles right after each other can't possibly be 8-byte aligned.