PSTL--A C++ Persistent Standard Template Library

The C++ Standard Template Library provides efficient storage of data in containers, and efficient operations on such containers. While STL can be parameterized with custom allocators, these cannot be used to add persistency to the container classes provided by STL. Thus, we have designed the Persistent Standard Template Library (PSTL) that overcomes this by providing its own containers that are compatible with STL, but store their elements on disk. This compatibility provides a programming model that is known and more natural to C++ programmers and enables the reuse of many of the algorithms provided by STL in combination with PSTL. In this paper we discuss PSTL's design, show the challenges we faced, and how STL's design would have to be extended to provide native support for persistency.