Wait! Get your hands off the keyboard, let the man speak! There are good reasons for this article, and it serves a good purpose! In my previous article on arrays (which isn't necessary to read for grasping the current one), some readers expressed concern that std::array might be slower than the built-in C array.

Several sources of truth exist on this matter, and today we'll go through each of them. Let's first find out what the standard states about it, then look at the std::array implementations in libc++ and libstdc++, and finally look at the assembler of some operations on these objects. Oh, and we'll top it off with benchmarking, of course.