Overhead to using std::vector?

Question

I know that manual dynamic memory allocation is a bad idea in general, but is it sometimes a better solution than using, say, std::vector?

To give a crude e

Answer 1

It is always better to use std::vector/std::array, at least until you can conclusively prove (through profiling) that the T* a = new T[100]; solution is considerably faster in your specific situation. This is unlikely to happen: vector/array is an extremely thin layer around a plain old array. There is some overhead to bounds checking with vector::at, but you can circumvent that by using operator[].