What I want is something similar to STL vector when it comes to access complexity, reallocation on resize, etc. I want it to support arbitrary index range, for example there could be elements indexed from -2 to +7 or from +5 to +10. I want to be able to push_front efficiently. Also I want two-way resize...
I know I could write something like this myself, but if there is an already written library that supports this please tell me.
Deque is very much like a vector in that it supports random access and efficient insertion at the end and it also supports efficient insertion at the beginning.
Map supports access based on arbitrary keys, you can have any range you want, or even a sparsely populated array. Iteration over the collection is slow.
Unordered map (tr1) is similar to map except it supports better iteration.
As a general rule of thumb, use a vector (in your case adapt it to the behaviour you want) and only change when you have evidence that the vector is causing slowness.