Vector storage in C++

Question

I wish to store a large vector of d-dimensional points (d fixed and small: <10).

If I define a Point as vector, I think a v

Answer 1

The only way to be 100% sure how your data is structured is to fully implement own memory handling..

However, there are many libraries that implement matrices and matrix operations that you can check out. Some have documented information about contiguous memory, reshape etc. (e.g. OpenCV Mat).

Note that in general you can not trust that an array of Points will be contiguous. This is due to alignment, allocation block header etc. For example consider

struct Point {
   char x,y,z;
};

Point array_of_points[3];

Now if you try to 'reshape', that is, iterate between Point elements relaying on the fact that points are adjacent in the container - than it is most likely to fail:

(char *)(&array_of_points[0].z) != (char *)(&array_of_points[1].x)