Genericity usually comes at the cost of performance. But it seems that we've come to terms with a handful of basic datatypes in our databases, and so I think it

Genericity usually comes at the cost of performance. But it seems that we've come to terms with a handful of basic datatypes in our databases, and so I think it makes a great deal of sense to specialize our fancy, theoretically fast, generic algorithms for this handful of datatypes. Also, I don't see how you can "beat" someone in terms of genericity? But I agree, the title could be a bit less abusive of the STL "brand": it could've used the word "performance" and downplayed generics. Funnily enough, the HTML title behind the link is indeed "Performance Engineering at Realm: How we optimized binary search".