STL Alternative

Question

I really hate using STL containers because they make the debug version of my code run really slowly. What do other people use instead of STL that has reasonable performance for

Answer 1

My experience is that well designed STL code runs slowly in debug builds because the optimizer is turned off. STL containers emit a lot of calls to constructors and operator= which (if they are light weight) gets inlined/removed in release builds.

Also, Visual C++ 2005 and up has checking enabled for STL in both release and debug builds. It is a huge performance hog for STL-heavy software. It can be disabled by defining _SECURE_SCL=0 for all your compilation units. Please note that having different _SECURE_SCL status in different compilation units will almost certainly lead to disaster.

You could create a third build configuration with checking turned off and use that to debug with performance. I recommend you to keep a debug configuration with checking on though, since it's very helpful to catch erroneous array indices and stuff like that.