FAQ 28.11 Should all projects use C s standardized containers?

FAQ 28.11 Should all projects use C++'s standardized containers?

Not always, because of big picture issues. We hope that someday the software industry will fully embrace standardized containers, but until then, be prepared to make decisions that will be uncomfortable.

When compared to other container classes, C++'s standardized containers have several benefits.

• They are standardized and are therefore portable.

• They are fast very, very fast.

However in large and/or mission-critical applications, integration issues often dominate. When this happens, it may be better in the overall scheme of things to use a vendor's proprietary container classes (see FAQ 28.10). Programmers who have not worked on large and/or mission-critical projects where integration issues became a problem do not understand this and usually argue in favor of the portability or performance of the standardized container classes.

For example, in some cases a particular vendor's library is considered essential to the project's success, and the library might be (shouldn't be, but in the real world it might be) tightly integrated with the container classes from the same vendor. In such a case, the cost and risk of integrating standard containers might not be worth the benefit. It's a dilemma of local versus global optimization.

Of course there are some cases where performance or portability is more important than integration. In these cases the standardized C++ container classes should be considered, even if integrating them with the other third-party libraries requires some invention.