This is precisely why I agree with C++'s choice of a balanced binary tree as the default map implementation for its standard library. There's no denying that i

This is precisely why I agree with C++'s choice of a balanced binary tree as the default map implementation for its standard library. There's no denying that in the vast majority of cases hashing is faster, but that's an optimization, unnecessary except in a few specific instances, and while balanced binary trees provide many other advantages in compensation for their slight performance penalty: predictable performance (via non-amortized worst-case bounds), minimized reallocation, insertion/deletion without invalidating iterators, ordered iteration, range queries, and so on.