Maximum alignment question

[Bogdan Marinescu <bogdan.marinescu@...>]

Hi,

In lobject.h, the first member of TString (dummy) is used to force
maximum alignment:

/*
** String headers for string table
*/
typedef union TString {
  L_Umaxalign dummy;  /* ensures maximum alignment for strings */
  struct {
    CommonHeader;
    lu_byte reserved;
    unsigned int hash;
    size_t len;
  } tsv;
} TString;

My question is, why is this necessary? I looked through the code, but
couldn't figure this out.

Best,
Bogdan