Hi, I'm preparing a patch to improve a performance of lexical_cast for certain combinations of types. For example, int to char transformation is 5.9 times faster on my FreeBSD. It could be even faster if not a requirement to add a thousands separator. There are few issues I'd like to sort out before I finish the work. 1. Enums, unlike integral types, are not optimized. I don't want to break a conversion from enums with user-defined operator<<. My firm opinion on this is not to support this edge case and allow optimization. 2. To improve a performance even further, I'd like to add lexical_cast< boost::array<N,char> >(arg) but it would break InputStreamable requirement. 3. A couple of conversion functions are good candidates for .cpp file. I expect a strong resistance to this change. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to change this in default build, I'm asking for new configuration parameter. Something like BOOST_LINK_CORELIB. A user should always link with -lboost_core if BOOST_LINK_CORELIB is defined. That do you think? -- Alexander Nasonov Project Manager at Akmosoft ( http://www.akmosoft.com ) Blog: http://nasonov.blogspot.com Email: $(FirstName) dot $(LastName) at gmail dot com