I think that is much more a symptom of not having good core libraries built into the language in the first place. Programs written in modern C++ tend to make h

I think that is much more a symptom of not having good core libraries built into the language in the first place. Programs written in modern C++ tend to make heavy use of the STL data structures. They aren't perfect, especially the maps, but they are solid and rarely a bottleneck. If you look at random numbers, time, the filesystem and even iostreams, there are plenty of rough edges to talk about it you want, but most people don't try to do their own thing in those areas because most programs don't need it at all. People will fill in gaps, so it depends on what gaps are left and how big they are.