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You say deque uses large-ish blocks but you provide documentation that it uses 512 byte blocks on GCC and MSVC is even worse. So if you're on Windows the blocks are so small the container degenerates into something like a std::list, and on non-Windows it only works well if your objects are a few bytes each.

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The gcc's 512 byte block is actually not that bad.

For cache locality, you want block size that is bigger that cache line size - and those are 64 to 128 byte range. And as for overhead, it seems like 1 pointer per block, or 1.5% for deque of pointers/integers - not a very big value. So yeah, while linked lists are bad, gcc's deque is pretty OK.

For MSVC, I agree, their std::deque is pretty bad. But the title of the post isn't "a faster deque MSVC", it makes no distinction between OSes.

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