C++ standard library - when should I use it and when shouldn't I?

Question

I was wondering how often people actually use much of the standard c++ library, particularly the stuff in the and

Answer 1

A lot of existing C++ projects don't use the standard library because they were started before you could rely on the standard library being available -- I'm talking code that's got a release history going back ten to fifteen years, here. I have also heard that some modern environments (for instance Android) still don't give you a complete C++ runtime, so if you need to be portable to those environments you still can't use it.

Another reason is that some extremely large programs (I have personal experience with the guts of Firefox, and I have heard that this is also true of OpenOffice) are built with exception support disabled, because it is fervently believed to cause performance problems (this may actually be true for MSVC++'s ABI and/or for programs of ludicrous size, such as the above two) -- but you can't use most of the C++ runtime if you do that.

It's frustrating, but that's the industry for ya.