Because someone might require different tradeoffs than those that were chosen by the STL's designers, such as in game development. Which is why EA created the

Because someone might require different tradeoffs than those that were chosen by the STL's designers, such as in game development. Which is why EA created the EASTL: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2271.html#Motivation http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227... Do note that some of the issues with STL as pointed out in the link above got improved upon as both implementations and compilers improved.