Thomas Witt in 2002 produced a prototype called cyclic buffer.

The circular_buffer has a short history. Its first version was a std::deque adaptor. This container was not very effective because of many reallocations when inserting/removing an element. Thomas Wenish did a review of this version and motivated me to create a circular buffer which allocates memory at once when created.

The second version adapted std::vector but it has been abandoned soon because of limited control over iterator invalidation. The current version is a full-fledged STL compliant container.

Pavel Vozenilek did a thorough review of this version and came with many good ideas and improvements.

The idea of the space optimized circular buffer has been introduced by Pavel Vozenilek.

Also, I would like to thank Howard Hinnant, Nigel Stewart and everyone who participated at the formal review for valuable comments and ideas.

Paul A. Bristow refactored the documentation in 2013 to use the full power of Quickbook, Doxygen and Autoindexing.