Introduction

Overview

The Standard Template Library refers to a C++ library of container classes, algorithms, and iterators; the collection classes give the developer access to fast and efficient collections.

The STL was developed at Hewlett Packard by Alexander Stepanov, with major contributions by David Musser and Meng Lee. A version of the Standard that incorporated the STL was first approved in the fall of 1998.

Each of the container classes is a template, and can be instantiated to contain any type of object.

The STL also includes a large collection of algorithms that provide template based collection manipulations functions and a collection of types and functions for manipulating iterators.