C++ Vector vs Array (Time)

You're using std::vector of bool and that's not what you think it is!

vector of bool is a bastard child template specialization that should never have existed and actually stores 1 bool in each bit. Accesses into it are more complicated due to masking and shifting logic, so will definitely be somewhat slower.

Click here for some info on vector of bool.

Also, you may be running an unoptimized build (almost certainly given the times you listed, 27 seconds is outrageous for 4 million iterations). The Standard Template Library relies very heavily on the optimizer to do things like inline function calls and elide temporaries. Lack of this optimization causes an especially heavy performance degradation for vector of bool because it has to return a proxy object when you index into it, because you can't take the address of a bit, so operator [] can't return a reference.

Click here for more info on proxied containers (The last half is about vector of bool)

In addition many STL implementations have helpful debugging bits that are not part of the standard which help you catch bugs, but really drag performance down. You'll want to make sure those are disabled in your optimized build.

Once you turn on the optimizer, have the right settings (i.e. no STL debugging turned on), and are actually testing the same thing in both loops, you will see almost no difference.

I had to make your loop much larger to test on my machine, but here's two builds of your vector of bool loop on my machine, showing the impact of optimizer flags on STL code

$ g++ main.cpp $ ./a.out 17 seconds.$ g++ -O2 main.cpp $ ./a.out 1 seconds.

Have a look at this

Using arrays or std::vectors in C++, what’s the performance gap?

std::vector<bool> is optimized for memory consumption rather than performance.

You may trick it by using std::vector<int>. You should not have performance drawbacks then.