Hi everyone, I often find myself using a specific data structure and I'm wondering whether: - it has a wellknown name - there is a generic equivalent in a boost library - or there is interest to add one. The basic idea is that you have a bunch of values stored in one object of type A: struct A{ vector<Value> values; }; and then you have multiple objects of type B that each have to associate data with each value stored in A. you could use: struct B{ map<Value,Data> data; }; but since A::values already provides a contiguous index for the values you can just as well store the data in B in a vector with matching indexes, and make sure that the indexes used in A::values don't change: struct A{ vector<Value> values; vector<std::size_t> freelist; map<Value,std::size_t> index; void erase(...){ push index of unused value to freelist; } void push_back(Value){ reuse a freelist entry or values.push_back; } }; struct B{ vector<optional<Data> > data; }; keep in mind that there is one object A for many objects B. you can now access the associated data of many objects B by looking up the index once in object A, and by wasting some space in B::data for unused entries: b.data[a.index[value]] If Data is a pointer or any other type that knows an empty() state, you can also get rid of optional<> and generalize it as two template like: template<class Value> class index; template<class Mapped,class OptionalTraits=boost_optional_traits> class vector_map; Is there anything like that?