More broadly, it's important to distinguish what things are aspects of the actual program semantics and what things are just common implementation strategies. L

More broadly, it's important to distinguish what things are aspects of the actual program semantics and what things are just common implementation strategies. Linking in lots of STL implementation code is not strictly necessary to get the behavior of a structure where one can push_back and walk over with an iterator. A similar argument to the article's would say that a compiler for a language with first-class functions cannot target a system with memory protection. That said, most general-purpose languages are designed with the expectation that they'll be implemented on a conventional target machine. Compiling something like C++ to efficient hardware is probably far into "sufficiently smart compiler" territory. So I'm inclined to believe the conclusion even if the proof is faulty.