Historically, in high-performance resource-constrained applications (eg: console video games), developers would use a "stripped down" version of C++ (eg: no RAI

Historically, in high-performance resource-constrained applications (eg: console video games), developers would use a "stripped down" version of C++ (eg: no RAII, no exceptions), which often included avoiding STL. It's less true these days, but still somewhat. In truth, STL will never be fully catering to these uses; that's not its goal. One reason STL was avoided is that control over memory allocation was quite poor. std::allocator was somewhat conceptually broken for a long time, only recently remedied in C++14 and 17. So, there's still about 20 years of code out there from the days of old bad C++ (: Another reason is that early STL implementations were poor, and not well-suited to high-performance use cases. Again, this has gotten better (some), but the legacy lives on. Here's a good one to read: https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL/blob/master/doc/Design.md https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL/blob/master/doc/Desi... So, if you are designing a library to be used in video games (such as in TFA), and want wide adoption, then avoiding STL, RAII, exceptions is still generally a good idea, IMO.