As you know, the C++ language is the brain child of Bjarne Stroustrup, who developed C++ in 1979. The C++ programming language is standardized by International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The initial standardization was published in 1998, commonly referred to as C++98, and the next standardization C++03 was published in 2003, which was primarily a bug fix release with just one language feature for value initialization. In August 2011, the C++11 standard was published with several additions to the core language, including several significant interesting changes to the Standard Template Library (STL); C++11 basically replaced the C++03 standard. C++14 was published in December, 2014 with some new features, and later, the C++17 standard was published on July 31, 2017. At the time of writing this book, C++17 is the latest revision of the ISO/IEC standard for the C++ programming language.

This chapter requires a compiler that supports C++17 features: gcc version 7 or later. As gcc version 7 is the latest version at the time of writing this book, I'll be using gcc version 7.1.0 in this chapter.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• STL overview
• STL architecture
  • Containers
  • Iterators
  • Algorithms
  • Functors
• STL containers
  • Sequence
  • Associative
  • Unordered
  • Adaptors

Let's look into the STL topics one by one in the following sections.