Performance and Choosing the Appropriate Container

Figure 15.2 presented the operations common to most of the Standard Library containers. Beyond these operations, each container typically provides a variety of other capabilities. Many of these are common to several containers, but they’re not always equally efficient for each container.

Image Software Engineering Observation 15.2

It’s usually preferable to reuse Standard Library containers rather than developing customized templatized data structures. For novices, vector is typically satisfactory for most applications.

Image Performance Tip 15.2

Insertion at the back of a vector is efficient. The vector simply grows, if necessary, to accommodate the new item. It’s expensive to insert (or delete) an element in the middle of a vector—the entire portion of the vector after the insertion (or deletion) point must be moved, because vector elements occupy contiguous cells in memory.

Image Performance Tip 15.3

Applications that require frequent insertions and deletions at both ends of a container normally use a deque rather than a vector. Although we can insert and delete elements at the front and back of both a vector and a deque, class deque is more efficient than vector for doing insertions and deletions at the front.

Image Performance Tip 15.4

Applications with frequent insertions and deletions in the middle and/or at the extremes of a container normally use a list, due to its efficient implementation of insertion and deletion anywhere in the data structure.

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