Dear all, I have sometimes spoken with people here that had an interest in allocators that could be reset within containers. For example, some have wanted a allocator& container::get_allocator(); member function. One way to solve that problem could be a class like this: template< class Allocator > class external_allocator { public: // forward to Allocator* member }; And then it can be used like this typedef external_allocator< std::allocator<T> > ex_allocator; std::allocator<T> alloc; ex_allocator ex_alloc(alloc); std::vector<T,ex_allocator> vec(ex_alloc); and can now control the allocator from the outside. There seems to only be a small overhead with this approach. One usage scenario I can see would be to use a stack-based allocator on performance critical paths. (because we need the copy-semantics of the container's allocator to be shallow) If there is interest, I can also add the specified member function to the smart containers. or an appropriate member to external_allocator<>. Feedback is welcome -Thorsten