Why/when shouldn’t you use STL?

STL aims to do as well as you could if you crafted non-templated code.

• But STL doesn’t cover everything, and having generic implementations means it will sometimes be possible to tailor things more efficiently.

• There may be operations you need to do more efficiently than you can with the existing structures.

If STL doesn’t fit your problem, it’s probably best not to force it, but they do cover a lot of ground. We will see in a couple of slides an example of sequential container selection.