Writing to index of vector beyond end of container

Question

Why does the following work? I thought that writing to an an index of a vector object beyond the end of the vector object would cause a segmentation fault.

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Answer 1

So under the covers what actually happens when you try to address an element of an array or vector that is outside the container's bounds is a memory dereference to a piece of memory that is not part of the container. However, reads and writes to this location can "work" or appear to work because it is just more memory that you are reading/writing to. You are doing something very very bad. You will generally see random junk when accessing memory outside of your bounds because it can belong to something else or is leftovers from a previous process because the memory controller will not naturally zero out memory on its own. So the best practice is to use the size of the container to check your reads and writes if you are ever in doubt as to if you are outside the bounds of the container. You can use vector.size() to find the current size of the container.