Review on STL: The C++ Standard Template Library

The word "list" in C++ programming language is a source of confusion for many programmers, what do we mean by lists? The famous standard library containers "STL lists" or the user-defined data structures known as "linked lists"?. Research inquiries: 1-What are the main differences between them? 2-Which one is generally better to use?

2008

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

We present a set of concepts (requirements on template arguments) for a large subset of the ISO C++ standard library. The goal of our work is twofold: to identify a minimal and useful set of concepts required to constrain the library's generic algorithms and data structures and to gain insights into how best to support such concepts within C++. We start with the design of concepts rather than the design of supporting language features; the language design must be made to fit the concepts, rather than the other way around. A direct result of the experiment is the realization that to simply and elegantly support generic programming we need two kinds of abstractions: constraints are predicates on static properties of a type, and concepts are abstract specifications of an algorithm's syntactic and semantic requirements. Constraints are necessary building blocks of concepts. Semantic properties are represented as axioms. We summarize our approach: concepts = constraints + axioms. This insight is leveraged to develop a library containing only 14 concepts that encompassing the functional, iterator, and algorithm components of the C++ Standard Library (the STL). The concepts are implemented as constraint classes and evaluated using Clang's and GCC's Standard Library test suites.

Since McCabe’s cyclometric measure, structural complexity have been playing an important role measuring the complexity of programs. Complexity metrics are used to achieve more maintainable code with the least bugs possible. C++ Standard Template Library (STL) is the most popular library based on the generic programming paradigm. This paradigm allows implementation of algorithms and containers in an abstract way to ensure the configurability and collaboration of the abstract components. STL is widely used in industrial softwares because STL’s appropriate application decreases the complexity of the code significantly. Many new potential errors arise by the usage of the generic programming paradigm, including invalid iterators, notation of functors, etc. In this paper, we present many complexity inconsistencies in the application of STL that a precise metric must take into account, but the existing measures ignore the characteristics of STL.

2005

2003

While tremendous progress has been made in developing parallel algorithms, there has not been as much success in developing language support for programming these parallel algorithms. The C++ Standard Template Library (STL) provides an opportunity for extending the concept of generic programming to the parallel realm. This paper discusses the basic requirements for extending STL to provide support for data-parallelism in C++. The ultimate goal is to implement a parallel library that is built within the existing framework of STL and exploits parallelism in existing sequential algorithms and also provides a set of parallel algorithms.

2004

Database indexes are the search engines for database management systems. The B+-tree is one of the most widely used data structures and provides an efficient index. An efficient implementation is crucial for a B+tree index. Our B+-tree index is designed to be a container in the style of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) and implemented efficiently using design patterns and generic programming techniques.

2006

This document proposes changes to Chapter 20 of the C++ Standard Library in order to make full use of concepts [1]. Unless otherwise specified, all changes in this document have been verified to work with ConceptGCC and its modified Standard Library implementation. ...

2011 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, 2011

The C++ Standard Template Library is the flagship example for libraries based on the generic programming paradigm. The usage of this library is intended to minimize classical C/C++ error, but does not warrant bug-free programs. Furthermore, many new kinds of errors may arise from the inaccurate use of the generic programming paradigm, like dereferencing invalid iterators or misunderstanding remove-like algorithms. In this paper we present typical scenarios, that can cause runtime problems. We emit warnings while these constructs are used without any modification in the compiler. We argue for an extension of the STL's iterator traits in order to emit these warnings. We also present a general approach to emit "customized" warnings. We support the so-called believe-me marks to disable warnings.