Recently I started making my own library for competitive programming; mainly for our ICPC notebook but also to use in online contests.

While I like the advantage that it gives to me, in my opinion it is against the sport. I don't think we should compete on who has dijkstra ready to be copy-pasted, and who needs to write it from scratch.

Obviously everyone can have their own library prepared, so that they will never have to code up dijkstra again, but this just means that the "quality of life" is worsened — why should we assume that everybody needs to do identical preprocessing to be on equal grounds? This just means we require more work from everybody in the community. Should we also ban vectors and sets and let everybody code their own?

The only downside I see of this is the sheer amount of work required to be 100% sure that the library is bug-free. Of course, it is still possible, just like std::set does it.

What do you think? I hope this post stirs up some discussion on this and maybe we'll improve the global experience from the sport.