Comment by orwin

Yeah agree. Roll your own linked lists (or rather: avoid them but if you have to use them, roll your own, it's like 30 min to 2 hours at most), your own btrees, your own ring buffer. I guess the gnu hashmap is fine 90% of the time, but if your use case is weird, you might want to run your own too. And BTW the glibc isn't really bad, just that in C, generic solutions will miss your specifics edge cases.

And this is true for strings too. If you use only static strings in your whole project, the standard is enough, but I won't write an IRC server or a posix Shell without my own strings (not anymore :p).