[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).