The STL runs anywhere GCC runs, and probably some places it doesn't. I suspect Perl is more widely supported than (full) C++, but there's money behind getting C++ compilers up to speed, so I would suspect things will improve. At times I've thought about trying to wrap versions of the containers for SV*'s. I did something similar for an edit distance algorithm I wrote awhile back -- took an algorithm templated on iterator type, and made it work with offsets in a Perl AV. I wrote an extra layer of non-template wrappers around it, then pulled it in with Inline::CPP, and it wasn't so bad. Depending on how the interfaces work out, e.g. how often callbacks are required for comparisons, this may or may not be efficient enough. If not, re-implementing them is not too hard, and can even be educational and enjoyable sometimes.

A bigger issue may be Perl's funky license. I know Parrot is re-implementing the kitchen sink because of licensing issues.

/s