What's New

June 13, 1997

This is a major release, with many new features. Here are some of the most important.

Exception safety. All STL components are now exception safe.
New container class: rope. A scalable string representation.
New container class: slist. Singly linked lists.
Member templates. If your compiler supports member templates, then you will be able to use the fully general form of containers' copy constructors and insert member functions.
New mechanism for accessing iterators' associated type information: iterator_traits. (Note: you can only use iterator_traits if your compiler supports "partial specialization".) The algorithms count, count_if, and distance have been rewritten in terms of iterator_traits.
Reimplementation of deque. deque has been completely rewritten, for higher performance.
type_traits mechanism, which allows omission of null constructor and destructor calls.
New temporary_buffer class. This was partially motivated by exception safety, but it is also more convenient and more efficient than the old get_temporary_buffer and return_temporary_buffer functions.
New allocator, debug_alloc, which is useful for verifying the correctness of memory allocation and deallocation.
New algorithms: copy_n, lexicographical_compare_3way, power, uninitialized_copy_n.
Greater portability. The SGI STL can now be compiled using Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, and Borland C++ 5.02; it should not be difficult to port it to any other compiler that has good support for templates. (Specifically, any compiler that has default template parameters.) Most compiler-specific code is isolated in the file stl_config.h.