STL Alternatives

STL reviews and mentions

• Writing your own C++ standard library from scratch
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2025

  The license was explicitly chosen to enable code sharing with LLVM's libc++ (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/open-sourcing-msvcs-s...).

  The MSVC STL's quality is good enough for thousands of pieces of Windows software (including Windows itself & Microsoft's software such as Office) to depend and rely on. It delivers excellent performance for a broad range of use cases. It is actively developed in the open, delivering cutting-edge (C++23 & C++26) features, accepting Pull Requests and wonderfully documented on GitHub. It can be consumed using MSVC and LLVM clang-cl (which the MSVC STL maintainers test with CI infrastructure). The maintainers are actively working on "hardening" features to enable more secure C++ (https://github.com/microsoft/STL/wiki/STL-Hardening).

  Unless you specify what "best" or "a library's quality" means to you, MSVC STL is excellent and because of that, the default choice on & for Windows.

  Google chooses to only support libc++ for Chrome/Chromium (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/t...). libc++ is not a Google-owned project.

• The case of the critical section that let multiple threads enter a block of code
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2025

  Yeah, as that Rust issue states, this was first replicated by a C++ programmer and STL (the person, not the Microsoft name for the C++ stdlib) said it looks like a bug in SRWLock.

  There's a Microsoft internal ticket which I can't read (but STL can because he's a Microsoft employee) but there's also a GitHub issue for STL (this time the stdlib, a GitHub project, although it was opened by the person) https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/4448 and it's confirmed in that issue this is a bug in SRWLock, thus no work for STL† (either the project or the person).

  It's not unusual (especially in C++ but this happens anywhere) that people would rather contort themselves to believe crazy things than accept that it's just a bug.

  † Both Windows and C++ holds themselves to a very low standard, "Yeah, it's broken, too bad" is acceptable. Once you've determined that it's a bug you're done.

• C++ String Conversion: Exploring std:from_chars in C++17 to C++26
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Oct 2024

  I believe the impl you link to is not fully standards compliant, so just calls back to

  MSFT's one is totally standards compliant and it is a very different beast: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/inc/charconv

  Apart from various nuts and bolts optimizations (eg not using locales, better cache friendless, etc...) it also uses a novel algorithm which is an order of magnitude quicker for many floating points tasks (https://github.com/ulfjack/ryu).

  If you actually want to learn about this, then watch the video I linked earlier.

• Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Aug 2024

  SRWLocks are a Windows feature, not a Rust feature, so you're looking in the wrong place.

  Here's STL's (nominative determinism at work) GitHub issue for Microsoft's C++ stdlib implementation about this https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/4448

  Here's the C++ Reddit thread where the bug was shown: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1b55686/maybe_possible...

  Here's the Rust change which was merged for 1.78: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/121956/

• DARPA: Translating All C to Rust (Tractor)
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jul 2024

  Interesting thanks. Seems the reason I couldn't find anything on that is because it's not really documented?

  https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/586

  > We talked about this at the weekly maintainer meeting and decided that we're not comfortable enough with the (lack of) design of this feature to begin documenting it for wide usage.

• Driving Compilers
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2024

  Microsoft does officially call their implementation of the C++ Standard Library in MSVC "The STL." This is due to historical confusion, of course, but it persists to this very day in official materials. Check the name of this repository.

  https://github.com/microsoft/STL

• Show HN: Logfmtxx – Header only C++23 structured logging library using logfmt
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2024

  Again, they are barely functional.

  MSVC chokes on many standard-defined constructs: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/1694

  clang does not claim to be "mostly usable" at all - most papers are not implemented: https://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html#cxx20

  And gcc will only start ot be usable with CMake when version 14 is released - that has not happened yet.

  And, as I mentioned before, IDE support is either buggy (Visual Studio) or non-existing (any other IDE/OS). So you're off to writing in a text editor and hoping your compiler works to a somewhat usable degree. Yes, at some point people should start using modules, I agree, but to advise library maintainers to ship modularized code... the tooling just isn't there yet.

  I mean, the GitHub issue is Microsoft trying to ship their standard library modularized, they employ some of the most capable folks on the planet and pay them big money to get that done, while metaphorically sitting next to the Microsoft compiler devs, and they barely, barely get it done (with bugs, as they themselves mention). This is too much for most other library maintainers.

• Cpp2 and cppfront – An experimental 'C++ syntax 2' and its first compiler
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Mar 2024

  Notice that there are in practice three distinct implementations of the C++ standard library. They're all awful to read though, here's Microsoft's std::vector https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/inc/vector

  However you're being slightly unfair because Rust's Vec is just defined (opaquely) as a RawVec plus a length value, so let's link RawVec, https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/raw_vec.rs.html -- RawVec is the part responsible for the messy problem of how to actually implement the growable array type.

  Still, the existence of three C++ libraries with slightly different (or sometimes hugely different) quality of implementation means good C++ code can't depend on much beyond what the ISO document promises, and yet it must guard against the nonsense inflicted by all three and by lacks of the larger language. In particular everything must use the reserved prefix so that it's not smashed inadvertently by a macro, and lots of weird C++ idioms that preserve performance by sacrificing clarity of implementation are needed, even where you'd ordinarily sacrifice to get the development throughput win of everybody know what's going on. For example you'll see a lot of "pair" types bought into existence which are there to squirrel away a ZST that in C++ can't exist, using the Empty Base Optimisation. In Rust the language has ZSTs so they can just write what they meant.

• C++ Specification vs Implementation
  3 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 19 Nov 2023
• C++23: Removing garbage collection support
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023

  Here is Microsoft's implementation of map in the standard library. I think of myself as a competent programmer / computer scientist. I couldn't write this: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/f392449fb72d1a387ac502...

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