C++ STL (Standard Template Library)

The STL is a regularly used C++ library that gives developers commonly used functionality that isn’t included in the C++ language itself.  The C++ STL includes containers: sets, multisets, maps, multimaps, hash sets, hash multisets, stacks, queues, etc.  It also includes strings and bitsets.  For the containers, the STL provides a standard (across container types) means to iterate through their contents.  It also includes algorithms compatible with the containers that allow developers to easily search, sort, intersect, and sum the contents of the containers to name a few of the algorithms available.

For more information about the C++ standard template library, sgi has a nice guide located here.  Also, this reference on CPlusPlus.com is good.

Projects we’ve worked on involving the C++ STL are all server services to date – i.e. a programs that run continuously in the background on a server.  Why would you want to do that?  If a software system requires massive amounts of data processing on a regular basis, a service can be written in C++ (or any suitable language) that is processes that data.  Let’s say you have a network of remote seismic sensors that are feeding you data continuously.  When the data comes in, it’s stored in a database unchanged.  To be valuable, that data requires some processing – maybe you need to correlate seismic events between several different sensors.  In this case, the service would regularly read seismic data from the database, process it, and store results of the correlation back to the database.  The C++ STL gives us convenient containers to work with that data while it’s being processed by our service application.

If you have questions or would like to talk to us more about our C/C++ STL experience, please contact us.