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Games and other high performance users generally used to stay away from the STL. Sony had their own version of STL which addressed some of these issues.

> The guy who tried this at EA didn't last long there.

Paul Pedriana, the man responsible for the lions share of the EASTL work, started at Maxis before it was acqired by EA in 1997. EASTL has been in continuous development for more than 10 years.

The STL is not optimized at all in this case, this is precisely the point. And like it or not, but Facebook has talented engineers to do that.

The STL isn't a library that can be optimized - it's a interface definition with expected complexity requirements. By it's nature (i.e. not tied to a platform) it doesn't have specific benchmark numbers. Specific implementations (e.g. MSVCRT, the GC++ implementation, the clang implementation) can be, and are.