Maps are great to get things done easily, but they are memory hogs and suffer from caching issues. And when you have a map in a critical loop that can be bad.
So I was wondering if anyone can recommend another container that has the same API but uses lets say a vector or hash implementation instead of a tree implementation. My goal here is to swap the containers and not have to rewrite all the user code that relies on the map.
Update: performance wise the best solution would be a tested map facade on a std::vector
See Loki::AssocVector and/or hash_map (most of STL implementations have this one).