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The Standard Template Library (STL) is a software library originally designed
by Alexander Stepanov for the C++ programming language that influenced many
parts of the C++ Standard Library. It provides four components called
algorithms,containers, functions, 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 and with any
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.
The STL achieves its results through the use of templates. This approach
provides compile-time polymorphism that is often more efficient than
traditional run-time polymorphism. Modern C++ compilers are tuned to minimize
abstraction penalties arising from heavy use of the STL.
The STL was created as the first library of generic algorithms and data
structures for C++, with four ideas in mind: generic programming,
abstractness without loss of efficiency, the Von Neumann computation model,
and value
semantics.
The STL and the C++ Standard Library are two distinct entities.
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The C++ STL (Standard Template Library) is a powerful set of C++ template
classes to provide general-purpose classes and functions with templates that
implement many popular and commonly used algorithms and data structures like
vectors, lists, queues, and stacks.