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Comment by kentonv | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I pretty much only use my own alternate container implementations (from KJ[0]), which avoid these footguns, but the result is everyone complains our project is written in Kenton-Language rather than C++ and there's no Stack Overflow for it and we can't hire engineers who know how to write it... oops.

[0] https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/v2/kjdoc/tour.md

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Every work place I've worked at has their own container classes for performance reasons.

We did use some C++ standard library but very sparingly. For example, std::unique_ptr<> was fine, but std::shared_ptr<> was not because of the way it implicitly stores it's reference, so we had our own implementation that exposed the reference.

When I was doing console games this was a must. You would often have restrictions where the container itself should live in a different area of memory to the items which is much easier to manage with your own classes.

The problem with that is that it is not providing the standard library API, but rather its own API. A good alternative should only remove footguns (ideally, to the point that you can replace with typedefs and get correct behavior just with less protection in case of future changes).

Aside, it's embarrassing that all these alternative libraries fail to implement automatic correct signed/unsigned mixing. It's not like it's particularly hard to implement!

Many std library footguns are inherent to the API...

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