The first Step Towards an Engine

Seems that the first task on my hand right now is reinventing the wheel in the form of container template classes in C++. Guess I'll start working on those, since they've been long overdue anyways. And from experience, I know STL is slow. Just how much slower? Well, under Visual Studios with the MS compilers, about 5 to 6 times slower. 2 programs I wrote to crunch numbers, actually two versions. One with STL and the other was written with normal dynamic memory allocation. The result....one takes 36 hours to churn out results while the other takes only 6 to do the same things. That's quite a difference if you ask me.