I didn't mean anything negative. You asked whether the idea was common knowledge. I've seen it used as a homework problem e.g. after the introduction of Fibonacci heaps. Last time for sure was 1984. Usually homework problems fall in the domain of "common knowedge."
Googling "linked list of arrays" provides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VList "... the VList is a persistent data structure designed by Phil Bagwell in 2002 that combines the fast indexing of arrays with the easy extension of cons-based (or singly-linked) linked lists ... " I guess yours aren't persistent, but otherwise the idea seems to match. Certainly you've picked the benchmark cases where the vlist advantages over a pointer to a single array. I can't see how the vlist would intrinsically use less memory unless you mean they may causes less heap fragmentation, which I can believe. As you say, applications tend to iterate over vectors. Indexing VLists will require more instructions than indexing a single vector, which your benchmark shows. This was the basis for my "marginally better" guess: what is saves while pushing can easily be lost again while traversing. To be fair about comparing with the usual STL implementation you ought to point out that when many items are to be pushed onto a vector most libraries let you pre-allocate the space. E.g. in C++ you can say v.reserve(1000). before pushing a thousand new elements on v. In this way you avoid a lot of copying overhead. Best regards!
