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Standard Template Library

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Also known as STL, C++ Programming/STL, C++ STL, C++ Standard Template Library

software library for the C++ programming language

Wikidata facts

Instance of
software library
Show 4 more facts
different from
C++ Standard Library
Stack Exchange tag
stackoverflow.com/tags/stl
programmed in
C++
Sources (1)

via Wikidata · CC0

~12 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The Standard Template Library (STL) was a software library originally designed by Alexander Stepanov for the C++ programming language that influenced many parts of the C++ Standard Library, though no longer is actively maintained and is now mostly integrated into the C++ standard library itself. It provides four components called algorithms, containers, functors, and iterators.

The STL provides a set of common classes for C++, such as containers and associative arrays, that can be used with any built-in type or user-defined type that supports some elementary operations (such as copying and assignment). STL algorithms are independent of containers, which significantly reduces the complexity of the library.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Standard Template Library” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.