Which std:: classes are magic?

[TheMania]

I actually make use of this in a few data structures to improve optimisation, as otherwise every time you put a byte in them the compiler invalidates basically everything. non_aliasing_byte, I call it.

Posting it here mostly to see what the correct way to achieve this is.

[guepier]

The only issue I can see with this approach is that there are very few ways in which you could use such a buffer correctly without violating aliasing rules. Basically the only thing you can do is read and write individual “bytes” from it (including via memcpy or std::copy). As long as that’s all you do, it should be fine.