Right. When I read that paragraph, my thought was that this guy has no clue what he's talking about.
STL is anything but object-oriented; Stepanov is one of the greatest critics of OO. Also, STL goes to great lengths to resolve everything at compile-time through, e.g., tag dispatch. No indirect calls are involved unless you introduce them yourself. Bounds-checking may be enabled in debug-mode in some implementations, but it can always be disabled, and ways of doing so are well-documented.
STL is anything but object-oriented; Stepanov is one of the greatest critics of OO. Also, STL goes to great lengths to resolve everything at compile-time through, e.g., tag dispatch. No indirect calls are involved unless you introduce them yourself. Bounds-checking may be enabled in debug-mode in some implementations, but it can always be disabled, and ways of doing so are well-documented.