> * way faster to execute in a debug build Frankly, this doesn't _really_ matter. IIRC, most non-pathological use of the STL compiles into very reasonable code

> * way faster to execute in a debug build Frankly, this doesn't _really_ matter. IIRC, most non-pathological use of the STL compiles into very reasonable code when run through an optimizer. Let's be real. If you're shipping non-optimized code to a client, you don't actually care about performance. :)