In theory STL implementations, if used with a custom allocator, should be able to pull this off... that's why the STL containers all have internal 'pointer' typ

In theory STL implementations, if used with a custom allocator, should be able to pull this off... that's why the STL containers all have internal 'pointer' typedefs. Practically speaking, Boost.Interprocess includes a shared memory hash table implementation. Boost Multi Index, which is a further generalisation of containers to allow the construction of database-like indexes, is also Interprocess compatible. http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_57_0/doc/html/interprocess/allocators_containers.html#interprocess.allocators_containers.additional_containers.multi_index http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_57_0/doc/html/interprocess/a...