This is true. But this is a minor in my opinion. The root cause of this situation is that linkers complain about multiply defined functions - even when those functions are identical. Maybe someday we'll have smarter linkers - but until then this works quite well. It does require that one spend a little time explicitly considering code instantiation. But this isn't necessarily bad. Letting the compile/linker do all the work will lead to code bloat and compilation time problems. I definitely agree with you - smarter linkers would be a big gift. Right now dealing with templates is generally a pain because of linker issues, and requires that one takes a lot of precaution to insure everything compiles/links smoothly. I had the same problems when using the BGL last year, and also had to resort to manual template instantiation in the end. Jean-Noël