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ankerl::svector 🚚 <!-- omit in toc -->

• How compact can it get?
• Design
• Benchmarks
  • push_back
  • Random Access
  • Random Insert
• Building & Testing
• Disclaimer

ankerl::svector is an std::vector-like container that can hold some elements on the stack without the need for any allocation. There are lots of small vector implementations (absl, boost, folly, llvm, ...) but this here is special by how compact it is, while showing competitive benchmark results.

How compact can it get?

What's the minimum sizeof(..) of the different implementations, how much capacity does it have, and what's the overhead?

ankerl::svector can get as low as 8 bytes and still have space for 7 bytes on the stack. absl needs at least 24 bytes, and boost at least 32 bytes.

The overhead of ankerl::svector is just a single byte. Boost needs a whopping 24 bytes, absl is a bit better with 8 bytes overhead.

Note that boost's small_vector cheats a bit. E.g. boost::container::small_vector<std::byte, 15> won't give you 15 elements on the stack, but only 8 bytes. It seems to round down to the closest multiple of 8 bytes.

Design

ankerl::svector uses a tagged pointer. It uses the lowest bit of a pointer to determine if the svector is in direct or indirect mode.

In direct mode, the lowest byte is the control structure. It's lowest bit is set to 1 to make it clear that it's direct mode, and the remaining 7 bit specify the current size. So we are limited to 127 elements of inline storage at most.

In indirect mode, the first 8 byte (4 byte for 32bit) hold a pointer to an allocated block which holds both a control structure and memory for the elements. The lowest bit of the pointer is always 0 (thanks to alignment) to mark that we are in indirect mode.

Benchmarks

To my surprise, the performance of the ankerl::svector is actually quite good. I wrote benchmarks to compare it against boost::container::small_vector, absl::InlinedVector and of course std::vector. In all benchmarks I'm using nanobench. All compiled with clang++ 13.0.1 with -std=c++17 -O3, and run on an Intel i7-8700 that is frequency locked to 3.2GHz.

push_back

This benchmark creates a new vector, and calls push_back to insert 1000 int. This is the benchmark loop:

auto vec = Vec();
for (size_t i = 0; i < num_iters; ++i) {
    vec.push_back(i);
}
ankerl::nanobench::doNotOptimizeAway(vec.data());

To no surprise at all, std::vector is fastest here by a large margin. To much surprise though, ankerl::svector is actually quite fast compared to the other implementations.

Random Access

Creates a vector with 1000 elements, then accesses it on random locations with operator[] and sums up the results. Benchmark loop is:

sum += vec[rng.bounded(s)];
sum += vec[rng.bounded(s)];
sum += vec[rng.bounded(s)];
sum += vec[rng.bounded(s)];

To minimize loop overhead I'm doing the same operation 4 times. nanobench's Rng is used which has a highly optimized bounded() implementation (which is much faster than %).

Another surprising result, absl::InlinedVector is much slower compared to all other alternatives, ankerl::svector is slower than std::vector or boost but not by a huge margin.

Random Insert

Creates a new vector, and inserts a new element in a random location with vec.emplace(it, i). This has to move lots of elements out of the way.

auto rng = ankerl::nanobench::Rng(1234);
auto vec = Vec();
for (size_t i = 0; i < num_items; ++i) {
    auto it = vec.begin() + rng.bounded(vec.size());
    vec.emplace(it, i);
}
ankerl::nanobench::doNotOptimizeAway(vec.data());

Note that I always recreate a seeded random generator so the loop is 100% deterministic. Again, overhead from rng is negligible.

For some reason absl::InlinedVector is almost 5 times slower than std::vector. I double checked that I'm actually compiling absl with -O3, and that is the case. While ankerl::svector is slower than std::vector or boost::container::small_vector, it is still by only about 20%.

Building & Testing

This project uses the Meson build system for building. the CMakeLists.txt file is added as a convenience and does not build or run the tests.

How to configure & run the tests:

Clone svector, move to the root directory, and run

meson setup builddir
cd builddir
meson test

Disclaimer

ankerl::svector is new and relatively untested! I have implemented and tested all of std::vector's API though, and have 100% test coverage. Still, using it might set your computer on fire.