Revision as of 16:48, 2 December 2013

The C++ Standard Library is standardized collection of macros, values, types, templates, classes, functions, and objects for the C++ programming language declared or defined in 52 C++ library headers. The library provides a set of generic containers, utility functions to manipulate them, generic string and streams for input/output processing, memory management, thread management, and various other common services. The C++ Standard Library also incorporates a subset of the C Standard Library which includes 26 headers under a slightly different name.

The current standard that dictates the C++ Standard Library is C++11 which was published in August of 2011, replacing the the C++03 standard.

All library entities, with the exception of the operator new, operator delete, and macros, are defined within the namespace std or within a namespace netsted within namespace std.

Standard Headers

The C++ standard library provides 52 C++ library headers:

C Headers

The C++ standard library provides a subset of the facilities of the C Standard Library in 26 headers. They have the same name as their C header counterparts except the ".h" is dropped and a "c" prefix is added to them.