[jart]

There's plenty of papers you can find online where people beat the STL: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/cuckoo-eurosys14.pdf It's usually because there's some use case or underlying assumption they can make that the STL can't, because the STL is designed to be the best possible one-size-fits-all-approach, which is even further constrained by things like ABI history. So it's always a discouraging sign to hear a software engineer talking about such things as though they're holy, since that'd be like hiring a tailor who uses spandex.