You can learn more about it by purchasing the book _STL Tutorial and Reference Guide_, by David R Musser and Atul Saini, or by doing a search for STL in your MSDN docs.

It is supposedly standard and cross-platform, tho I've only played around with the VC++ version of it.

Mason McCuskey
Spin Studios
www.spin-studios.com

One of those stupid things that us programmers do, no matter how much we try to go with code reuse, or use good object oriented, is create a linked list(or stack or something) from scratch every time we need it-

class x{
x* prev;
x* next;

...
}

class y{
y* prev;
y* next;
}

and sure it's not a big deal, but that's how errors or memory leaks sneak in. STL lets you use code for this kind of stuff thats been tested, tested, tested and isn't buggy.

On another post the question just came up again "How do you tell if a linked list loops?" With STL the answer is, it doesn't. With STL you don't have to worry about dereferencing a bad pointer or trying to dereference a NULL one at run-time.

I've had trouble with other compilers (ming) where STL made the executable jump up by 150kb (when it was only 100kb to begin with) but this shouldn't be a problem with MSVC.

(Yes, it's probably a little slower than rolling your own lists, but that's not why you use OO techniques)