Scott Meyers presents yet more motivation to trust the library more than yourself. An article by the Autor of "Effective STL" published in C/C++ Users Journal.
"The number one activity on the Web is information retrieval." In part of his tutorial, Spool explained his findings on graphic design and users' success.
Sharing requires waiting and overhead, and is a natural enemy of scalability. This article focuses on one important case, namely mutable (writable) shared objects in memory, which are an inherent bottleneck to scalability on multicore systems.