alt Hacker Newsyeah it turns out that complex code, when its properly encapsulated and implemented in a bug-free manner, is not such a cost after all.
A correct skiplist is easier to NIH than a correct red-black tree (which for me was the final boss of the DS class in college), but has performance edge cases a red-black tree doesnt, if you treat it like a search tree.
I think it was more about binary size. There are a few sentences in the Qt containers documentation about them being "optimized to minimize code expansion".