Choice of the most performant container (array)

Question

This is my little big question about containers, in particular, arrays.

I am writing a physics code that mainly manipulates a big (> 1 000 000) set of \"particles\" (wit

Answer 1

First of all, you don't want to scatter the coordinates of one given particle all over the place, so I would begin by writing a simple struct:

struct Particle { /* coords */ };

Then we can make a simple one dimensional array of these Particles.

I would probably use a deque, because that's the default container, but you may wish to try a vector, it's just that 1.000.000 of particles means about a single chunk of a few MBs. It should hold but it might strain your system if this ever grows, while the deque will allocate several chunks.

WARNING:

As Alexandre C remarked, if you go the deque road, refrain from using operator[] and prefer to use iteration style. If you really need random access and it's performance sensitive, the vector should prove faster.