I get that... but Handmade Hero <i>is</i> an educational effort. It is trying to show people how to implement their own data structures. How to read the manuals for your OS and hardware and how to program that hardware.<p>There is no &quot;battle-tested&quot; single data-structure that is going to fit into every program ever written. Different data, different platform, different problem. The philosophy chosen by STL and Boost, etc, panders to the lowest-common denominator or some idealized use-case. That might be useful for certain applications but making an educated decision on whether to include it takes knowing the cost of memory access and how your cache is being utilized (or not as is often the case with STL bloat-ware). The &quot;zero-cost abstraction&quot; promise is a myth.<p>Any significant game engine or system will end up considering, carefully, it&#x27;s memory allocation strategy and access patterns. You will end up writing specialized data structures for your particular data challenges to best use the hardware and operating system running your program.<p>The more abstractions you add the more difficult it becomes to manage the complexity in your programs and you end up writing more abstractions to solve the problems with your other abstractions. Soon your program takes tens of thousands of cycles access the data it needs in your loop and you end up cutting out all of the abstractions anyway.<p>And there&#x27;s nothing wrong with teaching people to think this way. If we want to call ourselves engineers it&#x27;s time to stop thinking that only a certain elite is allowed to write the data structures we mere mortals are blessed to use. Everything has a cost. You can&#x27;t add features and incur no cost. Every instruction, memory access, page to disk -- it all takes electricity and time. We should be able to think about our systems holistically and consider each aspect of our system.<p>I&#x27;m not saying we should write <i>every</i> program from scratch every time. However we should be able to if it&#x27;s required by the problem we&#x27;re trying to solve. Our job is to solve data problems. We take data in and transform it to perform some task. Everything else from the bottom up introduces a cost to the system. Maybe 90% of the time you do need a garbage collector -- you&#x27;ve considered your access patterns and object life-times and know that the particular algorithm and its costs align with the goals of your system.