&gt; we&#x27;ve still avoided adding another potentially crappy dependency to our project.<p>No, you&#x27;ve just added the crappy dependency == your off the cuff implementation (which is even more work since you have to handle issues and unit testing for it too).<p>&gt; What the hell sort of library would you crack out to do a breadth first search traversal?<p>In Python I would use networkx probably, unless there was a good reason I couldn&#x27;t (such as working in an embedded environment where I couldn&#x27;t install large libraries). It ought to require an exceptional circumstance to stoop to implementing it myself.<p>Tell me, if we switched from talking about breadth first search to, say, inverting a matrix with Gaussian elimination and pivoting, do you feel the same? Are you going to trust your implementation over something you can get from netlib?