Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Implementing static_vector: How Hard Could it Be?

October 25 • 4:45pm - 5:45pm

by David Stone

Summary of the talk:

static_vector is a std::vector that allocates things on the stack instead of the heap. We have std::vector, so it should be easy to write a non-allocating version, right?

Sadly, it's not quite that simple. There are many aspects of the vector interface that make sense based on a container that can reallocate, but do not make sense for a container that cannot. This leads to some API differences. static_vector also faces certain challenges around constexpr that makes it both more and less constexpr than std::vector.

We will go into detail on how std::vector and how static_vector work, how they are similar, and how they differ. This presentation will be focusing on lower-level details and interactions with specific language features in C++20 and (hopefully) C++23. There will be lots of code examples, and we'll step through how they work and where they fall short, trying to build up to a working, production-ready solution.