Re: [boost] Some statistics about the C++ 11/14 mandatory Boost libraries

Subject: Re: [boost] Some statistics about the C++ 11/14 mandatory Boost libraries
From: Asbjørn (lordcrc_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-05-14 08:54:33

On 13.05.2015 18:19, Niall Douglas wrote:
> Boost 2.0 is a alternative distro of modular standalone Boost
> libraries which can be each downloaded separately.

A user perspective, FWIW.

I'm involved with an open source project which depends rather heavily on Boost 
libraries. The _direct_ dependencies are (off the top of my head):
- Boost.Accumulators
- Boost.Array
- Boost.ASIO
- Boost.Bind
- Boost.Filesystem
- Boost.Format
- Boost.Function
- Boost.IOStreams
- Boost.LexicalCast
- Boost.Math
- Boost.ProgramOptions
- Boost.Python
- Boost.Random
- Boost.RegEx
- Boost.Serialization
- Boost.SmartPtr
- Boost.Thread

So Boost has been awesome in helping us deliver a great product, and for that 
we're very grateful.

However it has also been a pain when building and releasing. Due to the 
inevitable bugs in the various Boost libraries, we have often struggled to find 
a Boost release which worked well for us.

One version might have a breaking bug in library X on platform B, another 
version might cause a crash on platform A due to a bug in library Y and so on. 
Each time we have evaluated multiple Boost versions to find one which worked 
well, a very labor intensive process.

We went from 1.37 to 1.43, then to 1.47 and recently to 1.56 which we're still on.

This is especially annoying for users building on Linux as they frequently can't 
use the distro-provided Boost and have to build from source (with frequent noise 
due to cmake using distro libs instead).

Based on the above experience, a more modular Boost does seem tempting from a 
user point of view. Being able to update library X to fix some annoying bug 
without also updating library Y which introduced a new, crashing-causing bug 
sounds great.

- Asbjørn