* for your purpose! Therein lies the challenge of writing standard libraries... choices must be made.
* for your purpose! Therein lies the challenge of writing standard libraries... choices must be made.
std::deque may never beat a hand-rolled ring buffer of fixed size that maintains cursors, but it will beat a hand-rolled linked-list implementation.
The typical implementation will generally exhibit better cache locality than a linked list, and will outperform it for random access as required by the specification (amortized constant, vs linear).
(The typical implementation per cppreference, although I don't think this is formally required by the spec, is a sequence of fixed-length arrays.)
So what I wrote isn't quite correct about needing to fiddle with memory regardless. But there is still overhead -- even if there's well-optimized code for the single chunk case, the container needs to check that condition.