Wrap existing memory with const std::vector?

Question

OK, so I recently learned that (a) std::vector uses contiguous memory by definition/standard, and thus (b) &(v[0]) is the address of that contiguous block of memory, which y

Answer 1

You can try reference-logic storing introduced in C++11 with std::reference_wrapper<>:

SomeClass cary[100];
// ...
std::vector<std::reference_wrapper<SomeClass>> cv;
cv.push_back(cary[i]);   // no object copying is done, reference wrapper is stored

Or without C11, you can create a specialization of such template class for bytes - char. Then for the constructor from char* C-array you can use ::memcpy: which unfortunately will then use twice as much memory.

::memcpy(&v[0], c_arr, n);

Something like this:

template <typename T> class MyVector : public std::vector<T> {
};

template <> class MyVector<char> : public std::vector<char> {
    public:
    MyVector<char>(char* carr, size_t n) : std::vector<char>(n) {
        ::memcpy(&operator[](0), carr, n);
    }
};

What I would recommend - replace all C-arrays to vectors where possible, then no extra copying will be needed.