[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).