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

Answer 1

Standard C++ perversely allows implementations of some iterator operations to throw exceptions. That possibility can be problematic in some cases. You might therefore implement your own simple container that is guaranteed not to throw exceptions for critical operations.

Answer 2

I have found problems in using STL in multi-threaded code. Even if you do not share STL objects across threads, many implementations use non-thread safe constructs (like ++ for reference counting instead of an interlocked increment style, or having non-thread-safe allocators).

In each of these cases, I still opted to use STL and fix the problems (there are enough hooks to get what you want).

Even if you opt to make your own collections, it would be a good idea to follow STL style for iterators so that you can use algorithms and other STL functions that operate only on iterators.

Answer 3

I think it's a typical build vs buy scenario. However, I think that in this case I would almost always 'buy', and use STL - or a better solution (something from Boost perhaps), before rolling my own. You should be focusing most of your effort on what your application does, not the building blocks it uses.