[Boost-users] [BGL] Why does astar_search require VertexList?

I am in need of a path-finding function, and decided to give astar_search from BGL a try. However, I have found to my surprise that astar_search requires a VertexList graph. Looking at the source code, I see that it does indeed try to iterate over all vertices. I find this unreasonable. My graph is not infinite, but it is large, and iterating over several hundred million vertices would completely kill performance for me. (I intend to perform several of these searches per millisecond.) I know for a fact that it is possible to implement A* without iterating over all vertices. What is the rationale behind the current astar_search implementation? -- Rainer Deyke - rainerd@eldwood.com