STLport was the open sourcing of SGI's STL implementation, and its existence I think kinda predated the completion of a full STL shipped with either MSVC or GCC

STLport was the open sourcing of SGI's STL implementation, and its existence I think kinda predated the completion of a full STL shipped with either MSVC or GCC. It got used back then because of, yeah, varying quality between compilers but also varying consistency. If you wanted something that could compile on both G++ and MSVC7 or earlier you were probably going to reach for stuff like that, or have a pile of #ifdefs and pain. C++ is a far nicer language to work with these days. Back then everyone rolled their own string etc. library, too. Sucked.