ACE Programmer's Guide, The: Practical Design Patterns for Network and Systems Programming

Chapter 5. ACE Containers

Robust container classes are one of the most useful tools one can obtain from a toolkit. Although the standard template library (STL), with its powerful containers and generic programming constructs, has been standardized by the C++ committee, some compilers and platforms continue to lack support for it. On some platforms, container classes remain unavailable.

ACE initially bundled an implementation of the STL with the ACE source distribution. Unfortunately, many compilers on which ACE ran did not support the C++ constructs used by the STL, so it was dropped from the ACE distribution. In its place, the ACE developers created a separate set of containers that are used internally by the library and are also exported for ...