I'm suprised that no one really mentioned performance in their comparison of STL vs. MFC. I've used MFC a lot and STL some. At work I've written a router. One of the areas I wanted to enhance in the router was a large packet queue. I experiemnted with queues based on a linked list I wrote back in the college days, a CList, an STL queue backed by a list, an STL queue backed by a deque, and finally, my new enhanced queue that would on work in an environment specific to my router. I have the results recorded somewhere, but off the top of my head, after my special queue, the next fastest was the STL queue that was backed by a deque. CList came next but it was a ways behind. What scared me is how close that deque came to being as fast as my special queue...

Anyways, just wanted to say that while performance programming is changing from what it used to be, there ARE situations where saving a second off processing 100,000's of transactions count, and for those types of situations, I'm not sure anything in MFC fits the bill. Just my 2 cents...