C.con

C.con: Containers and other resource handles

See also Resource management
C.con: Containers and other resource handles

C.100: Follow the STL when defining a container

There are of course other fundamentally sound design styles and sometimes reasons to depart from the style of the standard library, but in the absence of a solid reason to differ, it is simpler and easier for both implementers and users to follow the standard.

C.101: Give a container value semantics

Regular objects are simpler to think and reason about than irregular ones. Familiarity.
If meaningful, make a container Regular (the concept). In particular, ensure that an object compares equal to its copy.

void f(const Sorted_vector<string>& v)
{
    Sorted_vector<string> v2 {v};
    if (v != v2)
        cout << "Behavior against reason and logic.\n";
    // ...
}

C.102: Give a container move operations

Containers tend to get large; without a move constructor and a copy constructor an object can be expensive to move around, thus tempting people to pass pointers to it around and getting into resource management problems.

C.103: Give a container an initializer list constructor

People expect to be able to initialize a container with a set of values. Familiarity.

C.104: Give a container a default constructor that sets it to empty

To make it Regular.

C.109: If a resource handle has pointer semantics, provide `*` and `->`

That's what is expected from pointers. Familiarity.