[boost] Stack-based vector container

Subject: [boost] Stack-based vector container
From: Gregory Crosswhite (gcross_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-12-28 18:03:12

Hey everyone,

In the course of my work as a computational scientist I have written a 
container that emulates std::vector, but which is backed by an array 
whose size is fixed at compile time.  Concretely, the class looks 
something like the following:

     template<typename T,unsigned int buffer_size> class static_vector {
         ...
         protected:
             T data[buffer_size];
             T* end_ptr;
             size_t current_size;
     }

where in the [...] there are methods that emulate (at this time, 
partially) the interface of std::vector, save that the size of the 
static_vector is not allowed to grow beyond the buffer_size.

The advantage of using a static_vector over vector is performance.  In 
my code I have performed benchmarks that show up to a 30% performance 
boost of static_vector over vector;  the benefit occurs most stongly 
when working with lots of arrays of small objects, so that the use of 
dynamic memory rather than stack memory appears to add significant 
overhead to the computation.  (Note that I when running these benchmarks 
I would use std::vector::reserve() to pre-allocate the array so that 
std::vector would not perform multiple allocations as the container 
grew, so that should not have been a source of overhead.)

It seems to me that it would be useful to have this functionality 
generally available as a library, and in particular it might be a good 
fit for the boost family of libraries.  Is there any interest out there 
for having such a library in boost?  If so, I would be happy to do the 
work of taking what I have and fleshing it out so that it can function 
as a drop-in replacement for vector, which means modeling the Random 
Access Container and Back Insertion Sequence concepts as well as adding 
capacity() and reserve(size_t) (no-op) methods.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Gregory Crosswhite