> Wow. Really? Most serious people I know use other people's implementations that have already been highly optimized and well tested because they have better shit to do than reinvent the wheel.

Ditto. Those who decided to reinvent even basic data structure stuff left me a huge string of bugs to fix, which I eventually got so fed up with, that I started replacing their code wholesale with off the shelf solutions to stem the flow at my last job.

Aside from fixing an untold number of implementation bugs, the replacement caught several usage bugs as well, due to actually having some error checking built in.

We had just plain broken hashtables, "lock free queues" that didn't use memory barriers... or interlocked intrinsics... or even volatile, if my memory is correct - and not a debug visualizer to be seen before I got my hands on them, of course.

> I suppose if you want to write your own red-black tree from scratch, that's your prerogative. The last time I did was 20 years ago and not only will I never do that again, I will laugh at anyone who does it without a damn good reason.

Besides laughing, I'll tend to -1 the code review as well.