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Creating things from scratch is still definitely a thing, particularly for high performance code. Sure, there are plenty of data structure libraries, but squeezing out that last bit of performance often requires something bespoke.

For example, I recently wrote a custom CSV parser because I needed something that did no heap allocation but without mutating the original character array (using explicit string lengths).



This is a ton of fun! If you have the double-quote escaping then you have to mutate the data in place, but if it's just a table of numbers then not.

Usually CSV parsing doesn't matter, but when it does, it matters a lot.


Your comment gave me flashbacks to FORTRAN data files with fixed width data descriptors.




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