From what I've heard, there are two more major reasons to not use STL for gamedev. - Debug build performance. Release builds of C++ code using STL are generall

From what I've heard, there are two more major reasons to not use STL for gamedev. - Debug build performance. Release builds of C++ code using STL are generally pretty fast, but Debug builds suffer a lot (especially Visual Studio's std::vector implementation is notoriously horrible for debug builds). Debug executable speeds matter when you are debugging a game; you don't want to test your first-person shooter in 1 FPS! - Build speed. Because of heavy use of templates and historical cruft, STL slows down your build times a lot. The build-test cycle is very important when designing games; you don't want to wait for a few hours after you've changed a few lines of code to tweak a new feature. Gigantic distributed build servers alleviates this problem a bit, but they are pretty cumbersome to set up nonetheless.