You can't have the STL containers without templates though. If you want to special-case them in the compiler, then what about the algorithms library? If you want to keep the algorithms library, then what about your own code that implements a higher-level algorithm using the lower-level ones in the algorithms library? Without templates you have to write your algorithm once for every type of container, or else use indirect function calls which would not be good. So this won't really work well I think.

For me, the only selling point of C++ is templates, and I've never written a nontrivial program that didn't use them (and I like to think that I don't just use them frivolously).