[ryandrake]

> Generally speaking many C++ game engines avoid the STL stuff and reimplement their own more predictable containers

This seems a little like cargo cultism. I wonder if any of these shops regularly measure the performance of their custom containers and compare with the standard library on a modern optimizing compiler and make a reasoned judgment that it's still currently worth the trade-offs to stick with their own stuff.

[yoklov]

IME most of it is due to how bad c++'s builtin allocator support is though. C++11 helps a little but a lot of stuff you might want to do seemed to be impossible last time I looked. This is awful since games will often use pools and arenas, often heavily.

Part of it is also for cross-platform consistency. No chance for bugs caused by using a different stdlib, etc. This is worth it when a lot of the toolchains for consoles are arcane have the chicken/egg-ish problem of often having poor stl implementations since they expect everybody to implement their own.

I've been out of game dev for a while though. These days I'd expect using the C++ stdlib to be more common, and mallocs are faster now (although even if you're bundling e.g. jemalloc, I imagine you still get a substantial benefit from using pools or arenas in many cases).

[stevenwoo]

Older implementations of STL had a lot of issues, EA wrote their own version way back when to address them with a list of whys here: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227...

[ryandrake]

Right, but that was a long long time ago, 64 bits long. Even calling it "STL" nowadays kind of dates someone. I wonder how regularly EA currently does bake-offs between their stuff and the standard library. Not that it would matter at this point--they probably have so much legacy code depending on it that it would be painful to switch.

[pixel_fcker]

You can clone the repo and run the benchmarks yourself. When I last did it it was quite mixed (compared to libc++ on a MBP) - a lot of things were the same or slightly faster in EASTL, occasionally some things were an order of magnitude faster, some things an order of magnitude slower. Those were in what I would consider "edge cases" rather than general usage, for which the two were fairly similar.

As other comments have said though, the main reason it's used (and the reason I was interested even though I don't do games) is because the allocation story in the stdlib sucks.

[stevenwoo]

My recollection (which could be wrong, it's been a long time) is that the white papers Microsoft freely distributed for XBox 360 development said specifically to not use any STL containers except contiguous memory ones and probably not those either without custom allocators. The penalties for cache misses/pipeline flushes were very high and naive STL usage made both those things happen a lot in real games (Microsoft would step in and help developers and would do post mortems on things they did to improve performance).

[to3m]

You might also do this to improve debuggability and unoptimised build performance. The VC++ stdlib is particularly bad, as its authors have gone down the ultra-DRY rabbit hole even for simple stuff - a pain to step through, and it relies entirely on the optimizer doing its thing.

(libstdc++'s vector looks sensible in this respect - a good decision on their part. Haven't looked at any other aspects of it though.)

At one point the contents of vectors were often inconvenient to examine in just about every debugger, because you'd have to type out some infeasibly long expression to get at them, "vec._Mybase._Myval._Myptr[0]", that kind of thing, which you could also fix by writing your own container and simply calling your pointer field something like "p". (Same goes for smart pointers.) Luckily this is much improved in the latest Visual Studio but it may still be an issue elsewhere.

[badsectoracula]

> I wonder if any of these shops regularly measure the performance of their custom containers

Yes, while it wasn't often, we sometimes did benchmark tests to improve performance when bottlenecks were found, especially towards the game's release when we were focusing on optimizations. IIRC we did some minor changes in the dynamic array container and we rewrote the hashmap and hashset implementations. One of the programmers wrote a performance test comparing several algorithms both with synthetic and real data (from the case that created the bottleneck).

> compare with the standard library on a modern optimizing compiler and make a reasoned judgment that it's still currently worth the trade-offs to stick with their own stuff.

There are other reasons to use a custom container than just the pure performance of the container itself. One is using a different allocation scheme, as the example i gave in the grandparent post, another is to use a friendlier API (see `find` and friends) and add more features. An important one in our engine was support for the custom RTTI that was used for object serialization and the scripting language that also worked and exposed those directly - the container, the RTTI implementation and the scripting runtime had to have intimate knowledge about each other to work transparently (especially when the editor entered the picture, where you could create new entries, often objects but also sometimes structs or other data types, by editing the array directly in a property editor).

Of course not all engines do that and TBH most of the performance and memory related bits are more relevant to consoles than (desktop) PCs (the API friendliness and RTTI stuff are platform agnostic though :-P). At the previous gaming company i worked at, the engine used standard containers. Also AFAIK the engine used by the Two Worlds games also uses standard containers (based on some of their developers' comments).

Personally when i write C++ i implement my own containers not because of performance but simply because i dislike the STL API - for example i want to have "Find", "IndeOf", "Swap", etc methods in the container itself :-P. Sadly it seems that i'll also need to do the same if i decide to start working with D seriously since D's standard library seem to more or less copy the STL API style.

[lj3]

> I wonder if any of these shops regularly measure the performance of their custom containers

You don't know? Maybe you should find out before slinging around accusations of cargo cultism.

[ryandrake]

Of course I don't know--that's why I said "I wonder". I have, however, worked in non-game-developing companies who eschewed the standard library, and when pressed the argument boiled down to: someone who worked here long ago said the STL was slow and therefore we don't use it. I am _wondering_ if it's the same story at other companies.