C++Now 2018

Although the existing standard containers have served us well for the last two decades, they are starting to show their age. Recent reports of positive experiences with the PMR-based containers provide one example of how seemingly small improvements in the containers can have a big payoff. With the creation and reservation of the std2 namespace comes the exciting prospect of refactoring the standard containers for C++2x, a possibility rasied and briefly discussed at last year's conference.

This talk will first review weaknesses in the current container library and discuss corresponding opportunities for improvement. We'll then list some tentative requirements, distinguishing between the needs of ordinary users and power users. We'll cover the need for meaningful names, and emphasize the distinction between low-level concrete containers, such as linked lists, and high-level adaptor containers, such as stacks. We'll then present a proposed high-level design for the container library and an idiom for container implementation that fulfills those requirements. We'll also cover changes to allocators and memory management facilities needed to support the proposed design. Along the way we'll look at example code for implementation and usage, and discuss ways to improve the containers' public APIs.