Reimplementing STL Containers in C++

I built my own versions of the C++ Standard Template Library containers because I wanted to understand what’s really happening under the hood.

What I Built:

• Vector that doesn’t leak memory (most days)
• Doubly-linked list with proper iterator support
• Map using a red-black tree that took three rewrites to balance correctly
• Stack and queue adapters that were surprisingly easy after the hard parts

Everything follows the C++98/11 interfaces so it could theoretically replace the standard library (though please don’t). Includes proper iterator support, exception safety guarantees, and custom allocator compatibility.

The red-black tree for map implementation nearly broke me - balancing that thing after insertions and deletions involved more edge cases than I expected. Had one version working perfectly except it would occasionally delete everything when removing a specific pattern of elements. Good times.

Performance is decent - within 5-8% of the standard library implementations according to my benchmarks. Not bad considering how optimized the standard implementations are.

Learned more about template metaprogramming, memory management, and data structure implementation from this project than from years of normal C++ work. The only way to truly understand something is to build it from scratch.