Extending STL with efficient data structures
Extending STL with Efficient Data Structures

The Standard Template Library (STL) is a C library that provides a set of wellstructured generic C components that work together. Based on its well-structured design, STL can be extended by adding new generic algorithms or new generic containers. In this paper, the work on extending STL by adding several efficient cofitainer classes for threaded binary search trees is discussed. It is shown that the addition of threads signilicantly increases the efficiency of some important access operations on the binary tree containers. In general, significant gain in efficiency can be expected in situations where the data structures are relatively stable, that is, the data structures are looked up often but modified little.