[jcranmer]

std::map and std::unordered_map are just unbelievably shitty implementations. The former is a red-black tree, which in my entire programming career I have needed to reach for like... twice? It's just not the right container for almost any problem you have, yet it's the one that gets the short, sweet name. The latter is a bucket-based hashmap, which is about the worst kind of hashmap that can be built. On top of that, their APIs are also really annoying to use compared to, say, Python or Rust's implementation. At least C++20 finally added a simple contains method, but something like setdefault is just a chore to get implemented.

[tptacek]

Not really apropos any of this but a vivid career memory for me is leaving a startup that was all in C++ and going to Arbor Networks, which was all C, and porting the STLport map to rbtree.c and making it our default container. No, I have no idea why I did that. Different times!

[WalterBright]

Pretty much the only collections I use are:

1. arrays

2. linked lists

3. hash tables

4. simple binary trees