Phil Nash wrote:
However, from a pragmatic perpective, I still favour adding the libraries to the standard (in terms of interface and gaurantees). This is because, as others have said, in many (especially larger) organisations, policies governing adoption of third party libraries can make it difficult - if not impossible - to use even as open and free library sets as Boost's. Where I am now, even though Boost was on their "approved list", use in my team had been put off because of the overhead of adding it to our source control and our projects. We are finally using it now, but still only those libraries that are implemented in headers. Then there are the larger number of developers/ team leaders/ managers who have either not heard of Boost, or are not familiar enough with it to think it worth taking on - and quite a few that I have met have negative preconceptions about it that can be difficult to overcome. All these obstacles would be drastically reduced or eliminated when talking about standard libraries.
So we should put boost into the standard library because of the stupidity of some companies or team leaders ?