Chapter 8: Library Overview

The specification of the standard library is over two thirds of the ISO C++ standard. Explore it, and prefer it to home-made alternatives.

Every standard-library facility is provided through some standard header. The standard library is defined in a namespace called std. To use standard-library facilities, the std:: prefix can be used.

Headers from the C standard library, such as <stdlib.h> are provided. For each such header there is also a version with its name prefixed by c and the .h removed. This version, such as <cstdlib> places its declarations in the std namespace.