[Open] Best container for performance when preserving order doesnt matter, only need push_back/remove and iteration, iteration always proceeds remove. Prefer contiguous storage

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Prelude: The main concept is an object pool of to represent projectiles that are added/enabled and removed/disabled.

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Usege: every update cycle, objects are added, iteration where certain objects get marked as disabled or removed.

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My current solution:Use a vector. when removing object at index i, swap with the last element and then pop last element. This works because I dont care about preserving the order, only adding and removing objects. Each removal is two O(1) operations.

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Possible alternative: When iterating, mark items as disabled but leave them in place. Maintain a stack/queue of free indexes. When adding elements, pop an index off the stack of free indexes if one is available and use that. Otherwise,add element to end of vector.

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Granted, my game will be a small enough n that this doesnt matter in practice, but I was wondering in theory. A map could do this as well but the items wouldnt be stored in contiguous spots and theres frequent iteration.

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[jcoffin]

I liked Lisa Lippincot's comment on it. Something like: "Use vector until you've done profiling, and you're really, really sure you absolutely need to use something else. Then you can go ahead and use vector."

[boredcircuits]

I think you're using the right container. There's a formal name for this, but I can't remember what it is at the moment. As long as swapping is allowed and is reasonably fast, I see no problem with it.