A Comparative Study of STL Container Performance in C++17

DOI

No DOI

Published In

Volume 5, Issue 2 (2026)

Published Online

May-August 2026

Pages

29-35

Article Type

Original Article

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This study presents an empirical performance evaluation of key C++ Standard Template Library (STL) containers, including std::vector, std::list, std::deque, std::set, and std::unordered_set. The experiments were conducted on a Windows platform using the MSVC compiler under both optimized (/O2) and non-optimized (/Od) configurations. Performance was measured across four fundamental operations— insertion, traversal, search, and deletion—using datasets ranging from 1,000 to 500,000 elements. The results demonstrate significant variation in runtime behavior depending on container type and compiler optimization level. The findings provide practical insights for selecting appropriate STL containers in performance-critical applications.