You mean the downside that we also already know, i.e. that there are some situations where a custom data structure would be superior for various reasons (e.g. smaller footprint)?
Experienced programmers know when to reuse a generic library and when to roll out their own. We all know that.
Yet you dismiss generic red black trees because there is no realistic single program that uses 10 key/value combinations. Not only is this false, but as I illustrated in my reply, a single program is not the relevant scope to decide whether to use a generic implementation. And as someone who has written a red black tree library, I am definitely in favor of reusing an implementation unless you have an excellent reason, which "I do not need 10 different instances in my program" or "my favorite language and its standard library only have arrays built in" most definitely are not.
alt Hacker News
You mean the downside that we also already know, i.e. that there are some situations where a custom data structure would be superior for various reasons (e.g. smaller footprint)?
Experienced programmers know when to reuse a generic library and when to roll out their own. We all know that.
Yet you dismiss generic red black trees because there is no realistic single program that uses 10 key/value combinations. Not only is this false, but as I illustrated in my reply, a single program is not the relevant scope to decide whether to use a generic implementation. And as someone who has written a red black tree library, I am definitely in favor of reusing an implementation unless you have an excellent reason, which "I do not need 10 different instances in my program" or "my favorite language and its standard library only have arrays built in" most definitely are not.