Determining maximum possible alignment in C++

Question

Is there any portable way to determine what the maximum possible alignment for any type is?

For example on x86, SSE instructions require 16-byte alignm

Answer 1

Short of some maximally_aligned_t type that all compilers promised faithfully to support for all architectures everywhere, I don't see how this could be solved at compile time. As you say, the set of potential types is unbounded. Is the extra pointer indirection really that big a deal?