The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to comp.lang.c++.moderated as well. Wil Evers <bouncer@dev.null> writes:
Guch Wu wrote:
Boost has many terrific libraries. But I want to know whether they are ready for using in real projects. Which of them are mature enough, or just only in progress?
Good question. While Boost contains some really great libraries, other parts of it have serious problems.
What constitutes a "serious problem" depends on what your needs are. I'd appreciate it if you could add some detail.
At the place where I work, we used to reach for Boost for almost anything not (yet) available in the standard library. We don't do that any more, because in quite a few cases, we ran into real portability and API stability issues.
Could you be more specific, please? "Portability issues" could mean a lot of things, some of which might mean nothing to the OP. For example, if your "portability issue" was that some Boost library didn't work on a particular pre-standard (or highly nonconformant) C++ compiler, it might not matter at all to someone not interested in targeting such compilers. I'd also like to hear more about what you're calling API stability issues.
Instead, we now evaluate each Boost library separately before using it in production code. For some of the Boost libraries, we've actually decided to phase out their use at the first available opportunity. These are:
filesystem program_options serialization test
Because of portability and API stability issues, or for other reasons? -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com