What are the most used parts of STL?

Question

What parts of STL (no boost or TR1, please) people still commonly use in their professional as well as personal environments, if any?

These days I find myself using the following:

Containers:

• vector
• set
• map

Iterators:

• const and not for above containers

Functional objects:

• bind1st
• bind2nd

Algorithms:

• find
• find_first_of
• for_each
• swap
• sort

Please not only post a list of STL stuff, but also include your context or example of usage. This way we can all benefit from not just the name but its application.

Answer 1

I use all but binders. Boost bind is a good alternative.

I rarely use streams. Usually, I need more than the features streaming provide.

I use exceptions as base classes for my own exception types.

In the rest... I use the containers, iterators (sequences) and algorithms as needed.

Answer 2

Containers, algorithms and iterators are being used the most, at least as far as I am concerned

Answer 3

With remove/erase being a common idiom, I'm using std::remove a lot. I've on more than one occasion used a std::stack to make it clear to future readers what I intended (LIFO container). When I want a FIFO container, I often use std::deque.

Answer 4

I don't use algorithms too much because I don't like the binding and mem_fnc things too much. I can never get things done without looking up and trying a couple of times and I don't immediately understand constructs with them. I'm still waiting for C++0x lambda and bind...

Answer 5

I use std::vector when I need a collection of stuff and std::map when I need an associative array. I use iterators quite a bit, so I'm really looking forward to the auto keyword from C++0x. I don't use the standard algorithms much beyond std::for_each, but that's partly because I'm often calling the member functions find and erase for std::map.