Comment by ryandrake

For the containers in particular this makes a lot of sense because the C++ stdlib containers are just not very good. Some of this is because C++ inherited types conceived as pedagogic tools. If you're teaching generic programming you might want both (single and double) extrusive linked list types for your explanation. But for a C++ programmer asking "Which of these do I want?" the answer is almost always neither.

The specification over-specifies std::unordered_map so that no good modern hash table type could implement this specification, but then under-specifies std::deque so that the MSVC std::deque is basically useless in practice. It requires (really, in the standard) that std::vector<bool> is a bitset, even though that makes no sense. It sometimes feels as though nobody on WG21 has any idea what they're doing, which is wild.

Don't use standard library containers because we have our own containers that date back to before the STL was even stable.

Flashback to last job. Wrote their own containers. Opaque.

You ask for an item from it, you get back a void pointer. It's a pointer to the item. You ask for the previous, or the next, and you give back that void pointer (because it then goes through the data to find that one again, to know from where you want the next or previous) and get a different void pointer. No random access. You had to start with the special function which would give you the first item and go from there.

They screwed up the end, or the beginning, depending on what you were doing, so you wouldn't get back a null pointer if there was no next or previous. You had to separately check for that.

It was called an iterator, but it wasn't an iterator; an iterator is something for iterating over containers, but it didn't have actual iterators either.

When I opened it up, inside there was an actual container. Templated, so you could choose the real inside container. The default was a QList (as in Qt 4.7.4). The million line codebase contained no other uses; it was always just the default. They took a QList, and wrapped it inside a machine that only dealt in void pointers and stripped away almost all functionality, safety and ability to use std::algorithm

I suspect but cannot prove that the person who did this was a heavy C programmer in the 1980s. I do not know but suspect that this person first encountered variable data type containers that did this sort of thing (a search for "generic linked list in C" gives some ideas, for example) and when they had to move on to C++, learned just enough C++ to recreate what they were used to. And then made it the fundamental container class in millions of lines of code.

The majority of things Chromium bans would still get banned in green-field use.

Some notable exceptions: we'd have allowed std::shared_ptr<T> and <chrono>. We might also have allowed <thread> and friends.

> I wonder how many of these (or the Google style guide rules) would make sense for a project starting today from a blank .cpp file. Probably not many of them.

The STL makes you pay for ABI stability no matter if you want it or not. For some use cases this doesn't matter, and there are some "proven" parts of the STL that need a lot of justification for substitution, yada yada std::vector and std::string.

But it's not uncommon to see unordered_map substituted with, say, sparsehash or robin_map, and in C++ libraries creating interfaces that allow for API-compatible alternatives to use of the STL is considered polite, if not necessarily ubiquitous.

> I wonder how many of these (or the Google style guide rules) would make sense for a project starting today from a blank .cpp file. Probably not many of them.

That also depends on how standalone the project is. Self-contained projects may be better off with depending on standard library and popular third-party libraries, but if a project integrates with other internal components, it's better to stick to internal libraries, as they likely have workarounds and special functionality specific to the company and its development workflow.

I'd argue that the optimum was in long run to migrate to the standard version, that everyone (e.g. new employees) know. Replacing the usually particular (or even weird) way implemented own flavour.

I know, I know, long run does not exists in today's investor dominated scenarios. Code modernization is a fairytale. So far I seen no exception in my limited set of experiences (but with various codebases going back to the early 90's with patchy upgrades here and there, looking like and old coat fixed many many times with diverse size of patches of various materials and colour).

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