Is it okay to inherit implementation from STL cont

Question

I have a class that adapts std::vector to model a container of domain-specific objects. I want to expose most of the std::vector API to the user, so that he/she may use familiar methods (size, clear, at, etc...) and standard algorithms on the container. This seems to be a reoccurring pattern for me in my designs:

class MyContainer : public std::vector<MyObject>
{
public:
   // Redeclare all container traits: value_type, iterator, etc...

   // Domain-specific constructors
   // (more useful to the user than std::vector ones...)

   // Add a few domain-specific helper methods...

   // Perhaps modify or hide a few methods (domain-related)
};

I'm aware of the practice of preferring composition to inheritance when reusing a class for implementation -- but there's gotta be a limit! If I were to delegate everything to std::vector, there would be (by my count) 32 forwarding functions!

So my questions are... Is it really so bad to inherit implementation in such cases? What are the risks? Is there a safer way I can implement this without so much typing? Am I a heretic for using implementation inheritance? :)

Edit:

What about making it clear that the user should not use MyContainer via a std::vector<> pointer:

// non_api_header_file.h
namespace detail
{
   typedef std::vector<MyObject> MyObjectBase;
}

// api_header_file.h
class MyContainer : public detail::MyObjectBase
{
   // ...
};

The boost libraries seem to do this stuff all the time.

Edit 2:

One of the suggestions was to use free functions. I'll show it here as pseudo-code:

typedef std::vector<MyObject> MyCollection;
void specialCollectionInitializer(MyCollection& c, arguments...);
result specialCollectionFunction(const MyCollection& c);
etc...

A more OO way of doing it:

typedef std::vector<MyObject> MyCollection;
class MyCollectionWrapper
{
public:
   // Constructor
   MyCollectionWrapper(arguments...) {construct coll_}

   // Access collection directly
   MyCollection& collection() {return coll_;} 
   const MyCollection& collection() const {return coll_;}

   // Special domain-related methods
   result mySpecialMethod(arguments...);

private:
   MyCollection coll_;
   // Other domain-specific member variables used
   // in conjunction with the collection.
}

Answer 1

The forwarding methods will be inlined away, anyhow. You will not get better performance this way. In fact, you will likely get worse performance.