Other than that, I tend to be leery of using plain char arrays as buffers for objects of bigger types. I don't know to what extent this is a problem for libstdc++ anymore as more and more hardware is tolerant of misaligned accesses and as the default new expression typically returns memory suitably aligned for the largest fundamental type. But since there is no requirement in the language that it do so and I would tend to err on the side of caution and use operator new (as opposed to new char[len]).
Actually, after re-reading 5.3.4, I see that this idiom is supposed to be safe. Paragraph 11 has this note explaining the requirement for the char array form of the new expression to adjust offset the (already aligned) pointer returned by the allocation function by a multiple of the strictest fundamental alignment: Note: Because allocation functions are assumed to return pointers to storage that is appropriately aligned for objects of any type with fundamental alignment, this constraint on array allocation overhead permits the common idiom of allocating character arrays into which objects of other types will later be placed. Sorry for sounding the false alarm. I must have been remembering problems with arrays allocated on the stack. Martin
