[comex]

> You seem to be overlooking the ultimate counterexample: C. :P

I think one reason (of many) that C++ has replaced C almost completely for new development is the STL. Of course, the STL fundamentally depends on the language feature of templates, which you can only approximate in C, but considering that Java and Objective-C, among other languages, lasted pretty long with no generics and only non-type-safe containers, I think C could have benefitted greatly from basic things like resizable arrays, hash tables, trees, better strings, etc. in the standard library. Now it is probably too late for it to matter (which most people consider a good thing).

[krylon]

FWIW, the last time I cooked up something in C, I liked Judy very much: http://judy.sourceforge.net/

It has slightly awkward but very simple API, and it's very fast.