Also, there's another benefit downstream of that one: Powers of two work as a schelling point for allocations. Picking powers of two for resizable vectors maximizes "good luck" when you malloc/realloc in most allocators, in part because e.g. a buddy allocator is probably also implemented using power-of-two allocations for the above reason, but also for the plain reason that other users of the same allocator are more likely to have requested power of two allocations. Spontaneous coordination is a benefit all its own. Almost supernatural! :)