I think any attempt at defining a strict subset of a language is going to face some pushback like yours, but I do agree that while I agree with most choices thi

I think any attempt at defining a strict subset of a language is going to face some pushback like yours, but I do agree that while I agree with most choices this one seems strange. Rolling your own containers is boring and error-prone and won't have all the features of the STL. Also, while iostream is a bit of a mess, having it be strongly typed means that it's, in my opinion, well worth using over cstdio. One thing I was surprised not to see mentioned here is multiple inheritance. In my experience it gets really messy really fast. Also I really recommend reading the linked archived Boost discussion about a geometry library, it's quite funny. It starts with: double distance(mypoint const& a, mypoint const& b) { double dx = a.x - b.x; double dy = a.y - b.y; return sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy); } And after a couple of pages of refinements ends up with: template <typename G1, typename G2> double distance(G1 const& g1, G2 const& g2) { typedef typename strategy_distance < typename coordinate_system<G1>::type, typename coordinate_system<G2>::type, typename point_type<G1>::type, typename point_type<G2>::type, dimension<G1>::value >::type strategy; return dispatch::distance < typename tag<G1>::type, typename tag<G2>::type, G1, G2, strategy >::apply(g1, g2, strategy()); } But hey, it can compute distances in non-cartesian hyperspaces so that's pretty cool.