The Standard Template Library

The Standard Template Library (STL) provides a collection of containers, iterators, algorithms, and functors for C++. This is perhaps the most famous and widely-used C++ API. It provides template-based containers such as std::string, std::vector, std::map, and std::set, which you can specialize with your own types (std::string is of course already specialized for characters). The STL is therefore a good place to look for an example of compile-time polymorphism in C++. The authoritative documentation is the STL programmer’s guide from SGI:

• http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/