stable_vector<T>

A STL-compliant vector container, offering reference stability.

It might be seen identical to boost::stable_vector, although both are very different. What can we say about stable_vector?

• is it using contiguous storage, like std::vector — and this makes it cache friendly
• elements are being constructed in this storage itself, without extra memory allocations — this is a big difference with boost::stable_vector which is implemented as a node container
• it does not support deletions — there is no magic ; you cannot live with infinite continuous storage and no reference invalidations if elements can be removed
• last, but not least: when growing, the growing cost is predictible and constant, which is not the case for std::vector

Example

Basic usage:

    stable_vector<A> va;
    va.emplace_back();
    
    A& a = va.back();
    
    // client code can safely store the reference
    Notify(a);

Here, we are using the second template parameter (that defaults to 4096) to change the size of the chunk used as underlying storage:

    stable_vector<A, 1024> va;
    std::cout << va.capacity(); // prints 1024