>Do not implement your own fancy data structures: instead use the Standard Template Library. I use STL map, set, and vector all of the time and they remove the need for most other data-structures.
Don't the STL tree and map data structures have notoriously poor performance?
From memory, std::map is comparatively slow because the spec requires pointers to indices to be stable. In practice it is slow; see khash and many others
Personally i don't think this matters too much; you're using c/c++; you're already fast
Don't the STL tree and map data structures have notoriously poor performance?