[phamilton]

It's not a solid ISO standard. One of my coworkers recently gave me a c++ library to use. I linked to it and started making calls and found out that the STL from his compiler ( VS 2003) was incompatible with the STL from my compiler (VS 2010). They were simple things, like function calls that had their types changed, but nonetheless it rendered his library useless to me.

Compare to C, where everything is heavily standardized and you can use libraries from different compilers without much difficulty.