On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 08:48, Pace, Antony [Harman Pro Group UK]
I see other messages on this forum about platform compatibility and am getting more and more disillusioned with Boost. I thought the whole point was that boost libraries only needed a compliant compiler.
There are two kinds of Boost libraries: 1) Compliant implementations of complex things possible in ISO C++, like Spirit for parsing 2) Libraries to access fundamentally OS-specific things not provided by ISO C++, like Filesystem and Asio It's impossible to write the latter category of things so you only need a compliant compiler, and the boost libraries *are* the platform-independant interfaces. Their implementations are usually not put behind some other interface because the efficient ways of doing things are often different between them, and hiding the differences inside another layer would lose some -- or most -- of that efficiency. ~ Scott