CHAPTER 12

An Introduction to the
STL/CLR Library

The Standard Template Library (STL) is commonly used by C++ programmers and for good reason. It has many advantages over comparable libraries, such as the .NET Framework collections; it provides users with certain guarantees regarding the performance of the algorithms; and it separates algorithms from data. A new library, STL/CLR, brings these advantages to the managed code developer and presents an alternative to the .NET Framework collection classes, such as List, Dictionary, and so on. STL/CLR is a reimplementation of STL for C++/CLI, but it adds some additional functionality as well to make it easier to interoperate with .NET collections.

If you already know about the STL library, you can probably skim through the discussion of the STL/CLR collections, iterators, and algorithms, unless you want a more detailed review. These sections will describe general principles of STL and STL/CLR collection template classes, design features that STL and STL/CLR share in common, and examples of collections, iterators, and algorithms and their use. Those of you who are more familiar with STL will want to pay close attention to those elements of STL/CLR that don't have an analog in STL: the generic interfaces that STL/CLR provides, which allow other .NET assemblies, perhaps written in other languages, to access STL/CLR collections, and the adapters that facilitate converting between .NET c....