C++ design question, container of instances and pointers

Answer 1

It depends how often you need to do that and how specifically. There is such a thing as a transforming iterator, and you could make one such that

vcopy( deref_iter( v.begin() ), deref_iter( v.end() ) );

would do what you want. However, that's not that much easier than what you have, and a straightforward function taking a pointer-vector and returning an object-vector would be easier to implement and to use.

Answer 2

You can transform() the container:

struct deref { // NO! I don't want to derive, LEAVE ME ALONE!
    template<typename P>
    const P& operator()(const P* const p) const { return *p; }
};

// ...
    vector<Line*> orig; // assume full ...
    vector<Line> cp(orig.size());
    transform(orig.begin(), orig.end(), cp.begin(), deref());