On Friday 29 May 2009 08:39:22 joaquin@tid.es wrote:
As a user, I can describe *my* reasons to favor header-only libs:
1. The whole bjam-driven building process is nontrivial and time and space consuming. 2. If autolinking is not available, picking up the right lib variant is not trivial. 3. Bulding libs selectively is not as easy as it might seem, due to the fact that interlib dependencies might force you to build libB when using libA, and you don't know in advance. 4. I'm not concerned about ABI issues given that, to start with, no ABI compatibility guarantees are provided across Boost versions.
This is not to say that I'd like *every* lib to be header-only; but I'd say the benefits of moving to a link-based lib should be balanced against points 1-4.
You can have your cake and eat it: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/3103 It requires one unusual thing, #including a .cpp file, but otherwise the usage is dead simple. Uli