As far as I'm concerned, the boost::swap utility is now ready to be used within other Boost libraries, at the release branch. Joseph Gauterin has merged the utility from the trunk to the release branch two weeks ago, and its release regression page is now entirely green: http://www.boost.org/development/tests/release/developer/utility-swap_.html Just to remind you: The boost::swap utility makes it easier to swap two objects of the same type in a generic and efficient way, because it tries to find the most appropriate swap overload by argument-dependent lookup (ADL), whenever applicable. Thereby it works around the issues some compilers appear to have regarding ADL. The boost::swap utility also supports swapping built-in arrays. The utility was developed with help from David Abrahams and Steven Watanabe. See also: http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/branches/release/libs/utility/swap.html http://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/branches/release/boost/utility/swap.hpp BTW, I've just added a boost::swap overload to the release version of Fernando Cacciola's value_initialized (utility/value_init.hpp), which is actually implemented by calling the boost::swap utility: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/changeset/49967 According to the following ticket: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/2243 Unswappably yours, Niels -- Niels Dekker http://www.xs4all.nl/~nd/dekkerware Scientific programmer at LKEB, Leiden University Medical Center