Amortized Analysis

[Martin Sebor]

Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> 
...
> 
> Personally I think all STL containers should have a shrink method so that
> the container can shrink to the exact size needed once you are done adding
> to it.  I know you can always create a new container and make a copy but
> this has the potential to be not as efficient as just freeing the unused
> memory.  Because in some cases this memory can be freed without any
> copying or reallocation being done.  For example in the case of very large
> strings which are allocated with mmap.

reserve() can be used to release unused space, although it's
an implementation detail whether reserve() actually releases
any memory or not.

Regards
Martin