A lot of that is that you have to protect against name collisions. You have things like c macro's so methods need to be wrapped in brackets{e.g (min)( a, b );

A lot of that is that you have to protect against name collisions. You have things like c macro's so methods need to be wrapped in brackets{e.g (min)( a, b ); } and also internal names need to be prefixed with an underscore and start with a capital (e.g _Foo) as that is reserved. The global namespace still exists so unqualified names that do not have a reserved id( eg _Foo ) cannot be used and need to be qualified (e.g ::std::(min)( a, b );). All this to protect against us. Some codebases are easier to read, I would rank them from libc++, MS STL, libstdc++ is readability. libstdc++ also seems to have code all over the place and use far more inheritance for composition of things.