MS Extensions To STL

Question

Hi all,

If this is a "Google Is Your Friend" question, I apologize in advance. I've searched but perhaps I've been using the wrong terms for searching.

Can anyone point me to any sort of introductory document on the STL extensions which MS provided with Visual Studio 2003? I believe the libraries were licensed from Dinkumware and I've seen their docs but they're not helping with this issue.

I'm trying to insure that we've not made some dumb and obvious mistake with our use of these extension containers. I've not worked on this issue myself--I'm helping another developer--but I believe the issue is something to do with the algorithm to create buckets getting into some sort of infinite loop within the hash_set container. As I say I just want to make sure we've eliminated obvious and dumb mistakes.

Answer 1

As usual, Microsoft's API's are documented by Microsoft, on MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1t4xas78(VS.80).aspx

Answer 2

One thing Microsoft has done starting with VS 2003 it to put non-standard C++ extensions in the stdext namespace:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ek139e86(VS.71).aspx

So doing a search on stdext (either on the headers or on MSDN) will help you. Note that while the above link talks only about <hash_set> and <hash_map> (even in the VS 2008 version of the page), the stdext namespace is used for other things such as the checked iterators and checked algorithms.