At the moment, boost::lexical_cast is about 70 times slower than corresponding C functions (at least with VC++ with all the optimizations enabled) for integer and floating point types (see my benchmark below). Is it possible to add boost::lexical_cast specializations for std::string, integer and floating point types? Val Samko === Benchmark code ==================== Output: VC++ 7.1: atoi: 1297ms vs lexical_cast: 79703ms g++ 3.3.3 (mingw): atoi: 1547ms vs lexical_cast: 148078ms #include <boost/lexical_cast.hpp> #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <windows.h> int main() { std::string s = "25413248"; int r; int REPEATS = 20000000; DWORD c1 = GetTickCount(); for (int i = 0; i < REPEATS; ++i) r += atoi(s.c_str()); DWORD c2 = GetTickCount(); for (int i = 0; i < REPEATS; ++i) r += boost::lexical_cast<int>(s); DWORD c3 = GetTickCount(); std::cout<<"atoi: "<<(c2-c1)<<"ms vs lexical_cast: "<<(c3-c2)<<"ms "<<std::endl; }