Summary

This chapter covered the essential techniques for altering and shaping data within STL containers. We began by understanding the nuances of copying and moving semantics in the STL, learning to make deliberate choices between copying versus moving elements depending on the context to optimize performance and resource management. We then explored RVO, a technique for optimizing compilers that removes redundant object copying.

We then examined the methods for filling and generating container contents, which are vital to efficiently initializing and modifying large datasets. We covered the mechanisms for removing and replacing elements within containers, balancing the need for data integrity with performance. The chapter also introduced the operations of swapping and reversing elements, deduplication to eliminate duplicates, and sampling to create representative subsets of data. Throughout, we focused on best practices to ensure that these operations are executed with precision...