OK, I'm trying to clear my mind, make some order out of chaos in my spaghetti code and finally reorganize the code I learned (more or less) around before starting do something more challenging (like cool things with shaders, for that I just ordered a book).

So, one of the first things I want to implement to throw away my "dummy" forward rendering is a sort of rendering command managements.
And here comes the dilemma: in what kind of container store the commands?

Let me first (correctly I think) exclude some common containers type:
- "simple" array, well don't think I will never able to establish the maximum number of commands per frame.
- every associative container (for me is just unintuitive).

- a stack, why should just process commands in a LIFO policy?

Now let's try to think simple: could a FCFS policy feeds well the GPU?
If yes, these could be good candidates:
- A double linked list, easy to reuse some commands, but I never liked lists performance for "small" contents.

- A FIFO queue, maybe implemented with a deque? It should fit well the FCFS policy, but prevents reuse of commands.
- Directly a deque or a dynamic array, providing a little more freedom then a FIFO queue.
- My own custom container, maybe providing a good way to reuse commands? (how?!? )

Simple assumption: different container for different "living state" commands could be a better strategy (ie: a container for use-only-one commands and another for reusing commands).

Please, share your thoughts, opinions or a draft of partial solution to this .

An other option:

Utilize the command queues of modern APIs. Add your rendering commands directly and concurrently to command queue and send them later on to the GPU.

Else: FIFO

An other option:

Utilize the command queues of modern APIs. Add your rendering commands directly and concurrently to command queue and send them later on to the GPU.

Else: FIFO

Unfortunately Direct3D 11 driver command lists + deferred contexts are broken and supported only by NVIDIA hardware and they do not work so well even on geforce afaik.

Using "software threads" in the correct way (multiple threads for creation and one for consumption) is usually better, or it is on what I usually read on slide and presentations; this is why I need a way to "group" the commands.

I use a buffer, with a counter that "points" to the first free byte ( starts at 0 ends at buffer size -1). Every command is a byte (sort of command ID) followed by additional bytes (ie parameters) if needed. If I run out of space, I simple realloc the buffer giving it some more memory than before. During debug, I break on this reallocations so to have an idea of how much memory a buffer needs and with this data, I prealloc the buffer at startup. To my experience, prealloc a few kb (2 or 3) will be more than sufficient and rarely will run out of space.

Thank you for the hint.