Hi Christopher, I think you are over-stating the importance of the stack. I just ran your
experiments with a heap-allocated inline_storage and got very similar results.
You are right, and I should have posted results for heap- and stack-based storage originally. Belatedly, here are my results for heap-based monotonic storage, VS2008: size mono std mono/std 3 0.001 0.008 0.12 13 0.027 0.046 0.58 23 0.089 0.119 0.74 33 0.183 0.226 0.80 43 0.31 0.369 0.84 53 0.474 0.555 0.85 63 0.669 0.745 0.89 73 0.912 0.987 0.92 83 1.183 1.269 0.93 93 1.467 1.594 0.92 Compared with my posted results for stack-based storage, VS2008: 3 0.001 0.008 0.12 13 0.027 0.047 0.57 23 0.085 0.119 0.71 33 0.179 0.23 0.77 43 0.305 0.377 0.80 53 0.472 0.552 0.85 63 0.655 0.759 0.86 73 0.883 1.009 0.87 83 1.14 1.295 0.88 93 1.444 1.639 0.88 Putting the data on the stack makes a slight difference. And it can only be explained by spatial locality on the stack. Not much difference in this specific case, surely, but ~5% is far better than nothing, especially if it is free. All this test did was forward iterate over the list. I predict there would be greater benefit if there was more traffic between elements in the container and stack-based values. In any case, the fact that it works almost as well on the heap as on the stack is a good thing. I need to isolate out the cost of new and delete, to see what the benefits are to having a smaller data-structure, if any. Christian.