Get the reader excited about why boost::intrusive is "cool". You know Alan Murta's GPC? It is fast. Really fast. It's well-written C. But with the boost::intrusive toolkit you easily can remake it in C++. Perhaps even faster (with less memory allocations). And with a lot less
Hi, Tom Brinkman wrote: lines of code. Very well then. Readable C++ becomes faster than C. Cool ;-) Seriously spoken, there are a lot of complex (geometric) algorithms operating over multiple sequences of the same set of objects. And of course all these algorithms needs to be fast. If you have 10.000, 100.000 or even more objects, the memory allocation done by std::list<T*> is not suitable any more. And if there are a lot of insertions and erases amidst the sequence std::vector<T*> is not suitable too. In this case you should be able to go one step down and use the fundamental container algorithms more directly. boost::intrusive gives you that option. There is another container (boost::multi_index) which can manage multiple sequences over one set of objects. It is safer to use but IMHO it's less flexible than boost::intrusive (AFAIK each object in a multi_index_container needs to be stored in every sequence of that container). Actually I think, that boost::multi_index easily could (and maybe should) be built on top of boost::intrusive. Regarding the unsafe programming thingy: I'm unsure about the term. What means "unsafe programming"? You have to keep in mind the lifetime of the objects stored in an intrusive container. Just like you have to keep in mind the lifetime of the objects stored in a std::list<T*>. However I admit, that 'intrusive containers' are perhaps merely a wrong and thus misleading name. In turn this would explain the "unsafe programming" feeling. Maybe they would be better labeled with something like 'intrusive sequences'. But I wouldn't change it no longer. Best regards Olaf Krzikalla