Why don't STL containers have virtual destructors?

Question

Does anyone know why the STL containers don\'t have virtual destructors?

As far as I can tell, the only benefits are:

• it reduces the size of an insta

Answer 1

As has been pointed out, the STL containers are not designed to be inheritable. No virtual methods, all data members are private, no protected getters/setters/helpers.. And as you've discovered, no virtual destructors..

I'd suggest you should really be using the containers via composition rather than implementation inheritance, in a "has-a" way rather than an "is-a" one.