Standard Template Library (STL): An Introduction Part 1

C++

Quite a fascinating language isn't it? But people will swear to it that their lives(especially developers) have been made a lot easier with the use of Libraries.

Today I will be talking about

• C  Libraries  and  Headers

• C++ Standard Libraries

• C++  Libraries  and  Headers

• C++  Standard  Template  Libraries  and  Headers

• Boost  C++  Libraries

1.  C++ Standard Libraries

C++ provides a huge set of libraries:

1. Standard ANSI C library ported over to C++. These libraries are name with a prefix "c" and without the ".h", e.g., <cmath> for C's <math.h>, <cstdlib> for C's<stdlib.h>, etc.
2. C++ new Libraries, such as <iostream>, <iomanip>, <string>, <fstream>, <sstream>.
3. C++ Standard Template Library (STL): consists of containers, iterators, algorithms and function objects.
4. Boost C++ libraries.

The cplusplus.com at http://www.cplusplus.com/reference provides a comprehensive online references for the C++ libraries (and updated for C++11).

1.1  C Libraries and Headers

• <cstring>: To be elaborated later.
• <cmath>: numeric mathematical library
• <cstdlib>: General utilities such as Execution (abort, exit, EXIT_SUCCESS, EXIT_FAILURE); Environment (getenv); Dynamic Memory Management (malloc, free, calloc, realloc), String Parsing (atoi, atof, atol, strtod), Pseudo-random sequence generation (rand, srand, RAND_MAX); Array searching and sorting (bsearch, qsort).
• <cctype>:Checkingcharactertypes (isalpha, isdigit, isalnum, isspace, isupper, islower, isblank, iscntrl, isgraph, isprint, ispunct, isxdigit) and character conversion (toupper,tolower).
• <climits>, <cfloat>: Size and limit of integer types (INT_MAX, INT_MIN, UINT_MAX, CHAR_BIT; and SHRT_XXX for short, LONG_XXX for long, LLONG_XXX for long long, CHAR_XXX for char) and floating-point types (DBL_MIN, DBL_MAX, DBL_DIG, DBL_MIN_EXP, DBL_MAX_EXP; and FLT_XXX for float, LDBL_XXX for long double).
• <ctime>: time, difftime, clock, gmttime, localtime, and etc.
• <cstdio>: C's IO operations (scanf, printf, fscanf, fprintf, fopen, fclose, etc)
• <cassert>, <cerrno>, <csignal>: Diagnostics and error
• <clocale>: localizaton
• <cstdbool>, <cstdint>, <cstddef>, <cstdarg>:
• <cuchar>, <cwchar>, <cwcchar>: Unicode characters.

1.2  C++ Libraries and Headers

• <ios>, <iostream>, <istream>, <ostream>, <fstream>, <sstream>:
• <iomanip>:
• <string>:
• <regex>:
• <random>:
• <limits>:
• <stdexcept>, <exception>:
• <complex>, <tuple>, <valarray>:
• <locale>:
• <typeinfo>:
• <chrono>:
• Others: <codecvt>, <new>, <ratio>, <system_error>, <type_traits>.

1.3  C++ Standard Template Libraries (STL) and Headers

STL was developed by Alexander Stepanov and Meng Lee at Hewlett-Packard Lab as proof-of-concept for so-called generic programming. It was released in 1994 and subsequently adopted into the C++98.

STL provides a collection of templates representing containers, iterators, algorithms and function objects.

1. A container (templatized data structure) can be used to hold fundamental-type values or almost any type of objects, e.g., vector<int>, list<string>, deque<Person>.
2. An iterator (a generalization of pointer) is an object that lets you transverse through elements of a container, e.g., vector<int>::iterator, list<string>::iterator.
3. Algorithms are used for tasks such as searching, sorting and comparison, e.g., for_each, find, sort.
4. Function objects are objects that act like functions.

STL is provided in the following headers:

• <vector>, <list>, <deque>, <queue>, <stack>, <map>, <set>, <bitset>, <forward_list> (C++11), <unordered_map> (C++11), <unordered_set> (C++11), <array> (C++11): Containers data structures template classes.
• <iterator>: Iterator for transversing the elements in a container.
• <algorithm>, <numeric>, <functional>, <utility>: Algorithm and function objects.
• <initializer_list> (C++11), <memroy> (C++11).

1.4  Boost C++ Libraries

[TODO]

NOTE: I will be updating this post as it has incomplete information(Boost c++ libraries)

Continuation of this post is STL Part 2. 

I hope it helped!