Hacker News Reader

But the c++ solution is transparent to the user. You can write entire useful programs that will use std:: containers willy-nilly and all propagate their allocators automatically and recursively without you having to lift a finger because all the steps you've mentioned have been turned in a reusable library, once.

View on HN

I'd file that in the category of "what I can't recreate, I can't understand".

With that argument you could discard JavaScript because V8 is hard to understand.

C++ giving you the ability to create your own containers that equal the standard library is a bonus, it doesn't make those containers harder to use.

That's a false comparison. There's a huge difference between a standard container library, and the combination of a (a) best-in-class byte code interpreter with a (b) caching, optimizing JIT, supported by (c) a best-in-class garbage collector.

I would argue that it's reasonable to say that creating a robust data structure library at the level of the STL shouldn't be that arcane.

Yes, and to get that nice feature you have to pay an enormous cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com