STL Pocket Reference

Boost

The Boost project is an open source suite of C++ libraries. It is a large project, with libraries for such diverse tasks as creating mathematical graphs, writing parsers, managing threads and concurrency, numerical programming, interfacing with the Python programming language, and so on.

What makes Boost interesting with respect to this book are additional containers, iterator adapters, and the library of function objects. This section briefly introduces Boost containers, function objects, and smart pointers; for details see the Boost web site at http://www.boost.org.

All Boost identifiers are declared in the boost namespace. The boost:: scope prefix is omitted from the following descriptions, for the sake of brevity.

Note

As I write this book, the C++ standardization committee is preparing a Technical Report (TR1) detailing extensions to the standard library. Some Boost libraries have been accepted into TR1, and others will most likely be accepted at future committee meetings. TR1 will not be normative, that is, library vendors will not be required to implement the library extensions, although most vendors probably will. Thus, you can think of this section as a preview of TR1.

Just as the original STL evolved during the process of standardization, so too will the Boost libraries. At the very least, the header names will change, as will the namespace name. Visit the book’s web site (http://www.tempest-sw.com/cpp) for up-to-date information about TR1 and how it affects these Boost ...