I know several (all?) STL implementations implement a "small string" optimization where instead of storing the usual 3 pointers for begin, end and capacity a string will store the actual character data in the memory used for the pointers if sizeof(characters) <= sizeof(pointers). I am in a situation where I have lots of small vectors with an element size <= sizeof(pointer). I cannot use fixed size arrays, since the vectors need to be able to resize dynamically and may potentially grow quite large. However, the median (not mean) size of the vectors will only be 4-12 bytes. So a "small string" optimization adapted to vectors would be quite useful to me. Does such a thing exist?

I'm thinking about rolling my own by simply brute force converting a vector to a string, i.e. providing a vector interface to a string. Good idea?