alt Hacker NewsThat’s definitely not true, and I’ll give two incredibly common examples:
1: arraylist. A library will probably do better than you. It’s already written and common.
2: webservers. Sure, you can write one yourself with sockets and a bunch of buffers and string management… or, you could use one of the 100s of existing ones. Which one? Probably a stable and established one.
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How many times has the stable and established X surprised you with some unexpected behavior?
Once upon a time I wanted a URL /like/this/with%2Fslashes/ where a path parameter could, in rare cases, contain an encoded slash. Legit according to every RFC I checked. Works fine in browsers. But I couldn't get the web server to not convert it to a / before hitting my code. And woe betide thee who wants to make nginx return a custom error code 444.
1. This isn't true whatsoever. You can easily do better than std::vector (trivial relocation support, non-inlined grow), better than C# List<T> (ref T accessor, batch add API, maybe even an add-uninitialised API or in-place constructing specific things), better than a Python list (this one is obvious), etc.
2. This is a better point but depending on your workload, I don't think this is unheard of. Or at the very least, if your workload is simple, you can grab one off the top of the benchmarks, point AI at it to customise it a bit then you're good. But to be fair this one's a bigger structural investment so I do see your point. For smaller utilities the tradeoff is pretty clear.