To STL or !STL, that is the question [closed]

Answer 1

There are just so many advantages to using the stl. For a long term project the benefits outweigh the costs.

1. New programmers being able to understand the containers from day one giving them more time to learn the other code in the project. (assuming they already know STL like any competent C++ programmer would)
2. Fixing bugs in containers sucks and wastes time that could be spent enhancing the business logic.
3. Most likely you're not going to write them as well as the STL is implemented anyways.

That being said, the STL containers don't deal with concurrency at all. So in an environment where you need concurrency I would use other containers like the Intel TBB concurrent containers. These are far more advanced using fine grained locking such that different threads can be modifying the container concurrently and you don't have to serialize access to the container.