Answer by J-a-n-u-s for How to allocate aligned memory only using the standard library?

The first thing that popped into my head when reading this question was to define an aligned struct, instantiate it, and then point to it.

Is there a fundamental reason I'm missing since no one else suggested this?

As a sidenote, since I used an array of char (assuming the system's char is 8 bits (i.e. 1 byte)), I don't see the need for the __attribute__((packed)) necessarily (correct me if I'm wrong), but I put it in anyway.

This works on two systems I tried it on, but it's possible that there is a compiler optimization that I'm unaware of giving me false positives vis-a-vis the efficacy of the code. I used gcc 4.9.2 on OSX and gcc 5.2.1 on Ubuntu.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main ()
{

   void *mem;

   void *ptr;

   // answer a) here
   struct __attribute__((packed)) s_CozyMem {
       char acSpace[16];
   };

   mem = malloc(sizeof(struct s_CozyMem));
   ptr = mem;

   // memset_16aligned(ptr, 0, 1024);

   // Check if it's aligned
   if(((unsigned long)ptr & 15) == 0) printf("Aligned to 16 bytes.\n");
   else printf("Rubbish.\n");

   // answer b) here
   free(mem);

   return 1;
}