From: richard@ex-parrot.com   
      
   I'm doing some coding in my spare time on an open source C++ project   
   which I won't name the project to avoid any embarrassment.  The code   
   base is about 250k lines long.  Much of the code is quite object   
   oriented in nature, though not excessively so.  Exceptions are used only   
   very rarely, which is just as well as much of the code is not exception   
   safe.  (Certainly no RAII here!)  Templates are used a bit, but not   
   heavily.  Other than a GUI library there are no third party libraries in   
   use.  All in all, I'd describe the code as pretty reasonable, though of   
   a rather dated style.   
      
   Recently I've been pushing to modernise the code in a bit.  Nothing   
   radical.  Let's start using a scoped_ptr class to avoid having to   
   carefully delete pointers at every function return.  Let's get rid of   
   our own buggy vector and list implementation and use std::vector   
   instead.  Why do we need our own sort algorithm which is no better than   
   std::sort?  And so on.   
      
   But I'm getting nowhere.  "The STL is inefficient", I'm told.  "It's   
   buggy or missing on many of the architectures we support."  "Why change?   
    We're fine with what we've got."  And so on.  I've failed to   
   demonstrate that std::vector is faster than our internal one.   
   Unfortunately my profiling uniformly suggests std::vector is 10% slower,   
   which may or may not be representative or even relevant, but certainly   
   isn't helping my case.  Even when today I discovered a double   
   destruction bug in our vector that had clearly been present for many   
   years, and have now found similar bugs in many of our other STL-like   
   templates, I'm still failing to get others to believe that our STL-like   
   templates are more, not less, buggy than the standard library.   
      
   What I'd really like is something, preferably on-line, that I can point   
   the other developers at that demonstrates that (i) the standard library   
   does work.  Really.  And (ii) it's fast enough.  Or, for that matter,   
   any other ideas on how to get the other developers on side.   
      
   --   
   Richard Smith   
      
      
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