Containers

Introduction

The standard library offers a wide range of containers which are used to store data. All these containers are implemented as templates to provide type-safety. Containers which provide an order of the data use the less comparison operator to compare two objects and determine their order.

The following containers are available:

• array (C++11): Corresponds to C style array, but with container semantics.
• dynarray (C++14): Corresponds to C style array, but with container semantics and dynamic allocation.
• vector: Dynamically sized array.
• stack: First-in last-out (FILO) data structure.
• deque: First-in first-out (FIFO) queue.
• list: Double-linked list, by default unsorted.
• forward_list (C++11): Single-linked list.
• set: Stores a sorted set of unique objects, where the key is (part of) the object.
• multiset: Same as set<>, but allows non-unique keys.
• map: Stores sorted unique key and value pairs.
• multimap: Same as map<> but allows non-unique keys.
• unordered_set (C++11): Stores a set of unique objects, where the (hash) key is (part of) the object.
• unordered_multiset (C++11): Same as unordered_set<>, but allows non-unique keys.
• unordered_map (C++11): Stores unique key and value pairs.
• unordered_multimap (C++11): Same as unordered_map<>, but allows non-unique keys.

As a rule of thumb, start with a vector<> to store your data, if you are not sure which type of container you should use.