I need a safe way to alias between arbitrary POD types, conforming to ISO-C++11 explicitly considering 3.10/10 and 3.11 of n3242 or later. There are a lot of questions about strict aliasing here, most of them regarding C and not C++. I found a "solution" for C which uses unions, probably using this section

union type that includes one of the aforementioned types among its elements or nonstatic data members

From that I built this.

#include <iostream>

template <typename T, typename U>
T& access_as(U* p)
{
    union dummy_union
    {
        U dummy;
        T destination;
    };

    dummy_union* u = (dummy_union*)p;

    return u->destination;
}

struct test
{
    short s;
    int i;
};

int main()
{
    int buf[2];

    static_assert(sizeof(buf) >= sizeof(double), "");
    static_assert(sizeof(buf) >= sizeof(test), "");

    access_as<double>(buf) = 42.1337;
    std::cout << access_as<double>(buf) << '\n';

    access_as<test>(buf).s = 42;
    access_as<test>(buf).i = 1234;

    std::cout << access_as<test>(buf).s << '\n';
    std::cout << access_as<test>(buf).i << '\n';
}

My question is, just to be sure, is this program legal according to the standard?^*

It doesn't give any warnings whatsoever and works fine when compiling with MinGW/GCC 4.6.2 using:

g++ -std=c++0x -Wall -Wextra -O3 -fstrict-aliasing -o alias.exe alias.cpp

^* Edit: And if not, how could one modify this to be legal?