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:

<algorithm>	<array>	<atomic>	<bitset>	<chrono>	<codecvt>	<complex>
<condition_variable>	<deque>	<exception>	<forward_list>	<fstream>	<functional>	<future>
<initializer_list>	<iomanip>	<iosfwd>	<ios>	<iostream>	<istream>	<iterator>
<limits>	<list>	<locale>	<map>	<memory>	<mutex>	<new>
<numeric>	<ostream>	<queue>	<random>	<ratio>	<regex>	<scoped_allocator>
<set>	<sstream>	<stack>	<stdexcept>	<streambuf>	<string>	<strstream>
<system_error>	<thread>	<tuple>	<typeindex>	<typeinfo>	<type_traits>	<unordered_map>
<unordered_set>	<utility>	<valarray>	<vector>

C Headers

Main article: C Standard Library

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.

<cassert>	<ccomplex>	<cctype>	<cerrno>	<cfenv>
<cfloat>	<cinttypes>	<ciso646>	<climits>	<clocale>
<cmath>	<csetjmp>	<csignal>	<cstdalign>	<cstdarg>
<cstdbool>	<cstddef>	<cstdint>	<cstdio>	<cstdlib>
<cstring>	<ctgmath>	<ctime>	<cuchar>	<cwchar>
<cwctype>