I'm attempting to build the serialization library outside of the standard build mechanism for Boost. For the most part this works great, with the exception that the symbol visibility under GCC is not defined correctly - our compiler settings set visibility to "hidden". Snippets from boost/serialization/config.hpp: #define BOOST_SERIALIZATION_DECL(T) __declspec(dllexport) T ... #define BOOST_SERIALIZATION_DECL(T) __declspec(dllimport) T I believe there has been previous discussion on changing these to BOOST_SYMBOL_EXPORT and BOOST_SYMBOL_IMPORT respectively since the __declspec is MSVC specific (http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/Questions-regarding-new-visibility-stuff-...). Additionally a patch was suggested (https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/2114) that I believe at the time covered all of the boost libraries with the same changes. It doesn't appear to have gotten into Boost.Serialization (at least as of 1.51). If it would save time I could provide a patch specifically for Serialization. Thanks.