That would be a useful improvement and there were discussions of this matter recently (in the context of porting Boost.SmatrPtr to Boost.Atomic). In particular, I proposed to provide a header-only interface for types that can be made atomic on the target platform and a separately included spinlock-based fallback that would require linking.
Is there any point in building a static Boost.Atomic library? I see why it'd be necessary to have the spinlock pool in its own DLL on Windows, but a static library doesn't seem to be adding anything. DLLs will still have separate copies of the spinlock pool. You might as well keep it header-only.
that's exactly the reason, why i suggested to build a shared library only. multi-module applications should *not* link to a static lib if they share atomic objects. being able to use a (lock-free) subset as header-only library would be quite convenient, though ... cheers, tim