One of the objections against <system_error> is that message() needs to allocate memory, because it returns an std::string. This is true even for user-defined categories that can implement it without allocating, with a static message table. To address this, I'm thinking of adding the following overload to boost::system::error_category (with the intent of proposing it for std::error_category): virtual char const* message( int ev, char* buffer, size_t len ) noexcept; This is modeled after the glibc-specific version of strerror_r (and in fact has the exact same signature and behavior). If the implementation has a static character literal corresponding to `ev`, it returns it directly. If not, it composes an error message into the provided buffer, then returns `buffer`. Comments?