I think you missed the philosophical justification at the beginning of the series. This is <i>Handmade Hero</i> we&#x27;re talking about where we build <i>every</i> system of the game with no help from libraries, frameworks, or engines. The whole point is to show people how it all works from soup to nuts.<p>Using libraries, even the STL in C++, would be cheating.<p>In the bigger picture of things these abstractions have costs. They&#x27;re not free despite the C++ propaganda machine telling us otherwise. It&#x27;s important to know what those costs are in order to make effective decisions about whether to include them in your project.<p>And finally the golden rule: if it looks right it is right. We&#x27;re not here to write pretty, elegant code. Your pretty abstractions don&#x27;t matter to the hardware. The target platform your system runs on is likely a highly-optimized piece of circuitry with real, physical constraints. Casey is the first programmer I&#x27;ve seen teaching people to keep the Intel manual handy and how to implement data-structures for cache-efficiency instead of pretty abstractions and virtual machines and template meta-programming.<p>It may not be a style of programming that agrees with you but it&#x27;s one that has a growing number of proponents from Casey to Mike Acton, Jonathan Blow, and others. It&#x27;s not a new idea either... but it certainly distinguishes itself as a reaction to the normative notion of programming by abstraction. It&#x27;s a philosophy that proscribes programming by mechanical sympathy; using machines to manipulate data to get the results you desire.