ASTL (Android STL) is a slimmed-down version of the regular C++ STL. Its sole purpose for existence is to be able to compile some third party packages. As a result only a subset of the regular STL is provided. We only add feature to it as we need them. Size of the library is a concern. For that reason, template usage has been reduced to a bare minimum, there is little parametrization in classes. To keep things simple, some inheritance hierarchies are just not there (e.g string is not a template specialization of basic_string - there is no basic_string class template.)