How to Hold a T
summary
Containers separate allocation and construction: T is the wrong type to hold a T, so use an unrelated storage type (char buffer or a union) and manually control lifetime with placement new and an explicit destructor. Practical claim: union storage gives correct size/alignment and supports multi-dimensional layouts, but non-trivial members require a user-written ctor/dtor and the container must handle exception safety. Warning: aligned_storage is UB and is fragile; real std::vector/optional implementations use these techniques and they work.
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chapters (5)
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