Re: iterator destructors

I was profiling a piece of code that seemed pretty simple and
straightforward, but was not running as fast as I expected it too...
it turned out that the majority of the time(67%) was being spent on
the destructor of the iterator I used in a loop. This function is
called thousands of times for every frame(it's a plugin for a graphics
package) so I ended up replacing the vector<>::iterator with an int I
used to call the vector [] operator. That proved fine in speeding up
my code, but left me with a bad taste in my mouth with regards to
using iterators and the whole generic programming thing... does the
iterator destructor really have that much work to do? Is that a price
you "have" to pay for using the stl algorithms? I'm using STLport, by
that way.
Thanks.