On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 12:43 PM Vinnie Falco <vinnie.falco@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 12:59 AM Artyom Beilis via Boost <boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
...it brings more headache than solves problems.
Given that many individuals and organizations using Boost do not develop headaches I would surmise that Boost itself is not the sole cause of said headaches.
Thanks
Ok I've seen several organizations that used Boost heavily in their code base and... had huge headaches. What happened since it was an internal project/product they just were stuck with some old version of boost. They couldn't upgrade because it broke huge amount of their code and they couldn't get some essential updates because there were stuck I also observed several cases when upgrading Boost was a major event that was breaking lots of code and required careful management. So, it is a real headache. There are always headaches when upgrading some toolkits (like Qt, and others) but boost takes it to an absolutely next level - because nothing is in sync. Now this is about organizations that release their own product, with their own version. So it is a relatively simple case. When we are talking about library or open-source projects that can be built on a very large number of platforms and versions it becomes virtually impossible to use boost intensively because there will be a very large gap in versions that is virtually impossible to close. An only alternative is to use private stipped version of Boost with renamed namespace (to prevent ABI clash with user's boost) I love that Boost gives lots of tools of a good quality and easy to use but sometimes I wish it was actually usable in any long term project. So sorry to break it to you, but It is a _big_ problem. Artyom Beilis