I'm looking for a container that preserves it's contained objects' positions in memory (it's pointers remain valid)
The container will grow and shrink constantly. Elements in the middle may be erased, but there's no insertions in the middle; all elements are pushed onto the back of the container. Iterator validity isn't important in this case, my only concern is that the pointers remain valid.
Is std::deque a safe and efficient option in this situation? I was previously using list, but it is allocating far too many times to be useful in this instance.
NO ! As opposed to std::vector, the elements of a deque are not stored contiguously: typical implementations use a sequence of individually allocated fixed-size arrays. The storage of a deque is automatically expanded and contracted as needed. Expansion of a deque is cheaper than the expansion of a std::vector because it does not involve copying of the existing elements to a new memory location