C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4

11. Container Classes

• Sequential Containers
• Associative Containers
• Generic Algorithms
• Strings, Byte Arrays, and Variants

Container classes are general-purpose template classes that store items of a given type in memory. C++ already offers many containers as part of the Standard Template Library (STL), which is included in the Standard C++ library.

Qt provides its own container classes, so for Qt programs we can use both the Qt and the STL containers. The main advantages of the Qt containers are that they behave the same on all platforms and that they are implicitly shared. Implicit sharing, or “copy on write”, is an optimization that makes it ...