> infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny)

People are so good at rationalizing their preferences that they sometimes say really stupid stuff withour realizing it. This nightmare scenario of relying on boost, std::vector, or whatever - it's really basic stuff that's both open source and easy to understand/debug - e.g. https://github.com/graehl/boost/tree/object_pool-constant-ti... (reminds me - I should really get around to submitting this)

That said, avoiding libraries (especially avoiding templates and just using void*-like stuff) does keep binaries/libs smaller, but I'll gladly make the computer work slightly harder considering that the result is the same speed (C++ is often faster than C, in practice).

The downside I care about is compilation speed. Simple C projects compile/link faster than modern C++ ones, even though the code for the same functionality is far more brittle, unsafe, and opaque