Registration is now open for CppCon 2022, which starts on September 11 and will again be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from last year’s conference. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2022 to attend in person, online, or both!

Faster, Easier, Simpler Vectors

by David Stone

Summary of the video:

The standard library has the type `std::vector`. It is used ubiquitously as a high-performance container. However, it was standardized in the mid 90s and C++ has seen many changes since then. It has been extended with allocators, move semantics, initializer_list, and much more. Can we do better?

We can. It is possible to write a container and a set of algorithms that are more efficient at run time, have simpler implementations, and have easier, more intuitive APIs. Not only that, but we can also make it easy for users to write their own vector-like containers that make slightly different trade-offs for when you need even more performance, and this presentation includes discussion of several such vectors.

We will go through specific examples of these vector-like types and the algorithms that operate on them, and then take from that general principles of software design. We'll look into how we're limited in what we can do by C++ as it exists today and what up-and-coming proposals can make things even better.