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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

In my experience the people who have strongly negative opinions specifically about the STL have it rooted in one of these two things:

- They haven't used it much in a very long time and have very bad memories of tracing through the completely opaque SGI STL implementation and its derivatives.

- They include std::string and/or std::iostreams as part of the STL, neither of which are part of the original STL and have all sorts of weird warts and poor interactions with the generic algorithm-focused core parts.

Not to say there aren't other reasons people dislike it, but these are big ones.

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Probably true. I wasn't much of a fan either when I first used it in 1996. It was extremely verbose, slow to compile, and tended to generate compilation error messages that filled the screen.

But the experience of using the STL today with the niceties of C++11 and a good compiler like Clang is vastly better. I can now write code almost as concise as Ruby that runs 100x faster, without usually having to worry about memory management. I avoid using the streams stuff though. That chunk of the library could use a serious overhaul.

I'm rooting for Rust because it's designed to address the problem spaces I care about most but C++ has improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years.

Yeah, Clang has really improved the ecosystem as a whole, as has this decade's updates to the language and libraries. But unfortunately they are all band-aids over some very deep foundational problems that were decided decades ago (I don't blame Bjarne by the way - he didn't have the benefit of hindsight).

I am glad we have a new language that takes the best from C++ and sets in on reasonably solid theoretical foundation inspired by languages like ML and Haskell. It's not watertight yet (unlike the formally verified ML), but it is damn better than the current status quo.

Are you coding currently in C++11/14 ? It doesn't feel "bandaid-y" at all.

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