ed from multiple empty base classes, even though the base
    classes themselves have no state. For instance, the size of
    <code>point&lt;int&gt;</code> from the <a href="#example">example</a>
    above was 12-24 bytes on various compilers for the Win32 platform,
    instead of the expected 8 bytes.</p>

    <p>Strictly speaking, it was not the library's fault--the language rules
    allow the compiler to apply the empty base class optimization in that
    situation. In principle an arbitrary number of e