Here's my experience. Whenever a C++ programmer uses the word performance, it's never to describe using template-based generic data structures. I do it and the performance is fine, but the hard-core C++ programmers seem to hate STL.

Incidentally, I asked someone about memory management in an interview for a C++ position. He said he wrote his own memory manager (object pool, basically), and never even bothered to use "new" or "delete".

Personally, I'm sticking to Haskell...