Also, boost.thread implement some features that are not yet official C++ standard features. There is also a slight difference of performance and between these libs and your particular standard library implementation. If behaviour have to be exactly the same for all platform, maybe Boost is a better alternative right now. For example VS 2012 and 2013 have a bug where chrono clocks have a minimum resolution of around 8ms which is a problem in some high performance multi threaded contexts because waiting synchronization tools (condition_variable, future.wait, sleep_for etc) are impacted by this. It is a bug so it will be fixed but not immediately. If you want to use exclusively the standard, use it until you find something that boost does and you want and the standard don't have it. Joel Lamotte