Standard Template Library

software library. It is part of the C++ Standard Library describing containers, iterators, and algorithms.

The STL has been a major boon for C++ programmers: it gives the programmer a ready-made set of common classes, such as vectors 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.

The STL achieves this result through the heavy use of templates. While this approach is very powerful, the resulting complicated code was (and sometimes still is) a problem for many compilers, which sometimes failed to compile valid constructs, produced invalid code, or required the programmer to put in extra effort to get things to work.

The C++ Standard Library is defined by ISO/IEC 14882.