[haburka]

Are you serious that dictionaries are a problem for performance oriented developers?

Performance oriented devs should be concerned with bottlenecks, not incredibly minute details. There's almost no situation I can think of where smallish dictionaries are much better or worse than any other data structure when it comes to performance.

Of course, if you're writing a compiler then it can be a serious difference. Most developers don't write compilers though.

[adrianN]

Yes, if you write performance sensitive code you have to be very careful with dictionaries. See for example this nice talk by Chandler Carruth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHNmRkzxHWs

[obstinate]

Well of course. :) If you don't write perf sensitive code, don't worry about perf. But if you do, in many cases avoiding hash tables can become important.