On Thursday 22 July 2004 11:13 am, JHAYNBERG@cooperneff.com wrote:
One, in general, how does one know when it is "safe" to use a boost library on a particular platform? For example, if a platform's failure rate is 15%, should boost be used?
Look at the regression results for that library and that compiler. If they all pass, you should be fine. Some libraries are more portable to broken compilers (shared_ptr is one of them) whereas others really require a highly-conformant compiler to work (e.g., Lambda).
And, two, with just the boost source (without building any libraries), I was able to use the boost::shared_ptr in my Solaris application by merely including the right header. Apparently, I don't need to build boost to use shared_ptr which leads me to ask, in general, how do one know when a library is needed (or not needed)? Shouldn't the fact that boost is mainly templates mean there should be little or no implementation (i.e. code that needs to be compiled into a library)? For example, many template libraries are provided as header-only solutions.
You can assume the library is header-only unless the documentation for the library says otherwise. Granted, we should probably say this somewhere. Doug