[1] The C++ Standard Library provides several generic containers, functions to use and manipulate these containers, function objects, generic strings and streams (including interactive and file I/O), support for some language features, and functions for common tasks such as finding the square root of a number.
The C++ Standard Library is based upon conventions introduced by the Standard Template Library (STL), and has been influenced by research in generic programming and developers of the STL such as Alexander Stepanov and Meng Lee.
[4][5] Although the C++ Standard Library and the STL share many features, neither is a strict superset of the other.
[citation needed] A noteworthy feature of the C++ Standard Library is that it not only specifies the syntax and semantics of generic algorithms, but also places requirements on their performance.
Previously, sorting was only required to take O(n log n) on average, allowing the use of quicksort, which is fast in practice but has poor worst-case performance, but introsort was introduced to allow both fast average performance and optimal worst-case complexity, and as of C++11, sorting is guaranteed to be at worst linearithmic.
These named modules were added to include all items declared in both global and std namespaces provided by the importable standard headers.
It has been proposed that additional modules providing other subsets of the standard library be added, which may eventually be included in a future revision.
Legend: : Deprecated : Removed Components that C++ programs may use for increased features.
Components that C++ programs may use to perform seminumerical or mathematical operations.
C++ does not provide the C POSIX library as part of any standard, however it is legal to use in a C++ program.