“...one of the most highly regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the world.” Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu, C++ Coding Standards

Welcome to Boost.org!

Boost provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries.

We emphasize libraries that work well with the C++ Standard Library. Boost libraries are intended to be widely useful, and usable across a broad spectrum of applications. The Boost license encourages both commercial and non-commercial use.

We aim to establish "existing practice" and provide reference implementations so that Boost libraries are suitable for eventual standardization. Ten Boost libraries are already included in the C++ Standards Committee's Library Technical Report ( TR1) as a step toward becoming part of a future C++ Standard. More Boost libraries are proposed for the upcoming TR2.

Getting started: Boost works on almost any modern operating system, including UNIX and Windows variants. Follow the Getting Started Guide to download and install Boost. Popular Linux and Unix distributions such as Fedora, Debian, and NetBSD include pre-built Boost packages. Boost may also already be available on your organization's internal web server.

Background: The Background Information page has introductory material to help those educating their organization about Boost.

Participation

Although Boost was begun by members of the C++ Standards Committee Library Working Group, participation has expanded to include thousands of programmers from the C++ community at large.

If you are interested in participating in Boost, please join our main developers mailing list. Discussions are highly technical, and list members are encouraged to participate in formal reviews of proposed libraries. There is also a users mailing list, and several project specific lists.

Both the main Boost developers list and the users list are also accessible as newsgroups.

Latest News

???, 2006 - Version 1.34.0

New Libraries

  • Foreach Library: BOOST_FOREACH macro for easily iterating over the elements of a sequence, from Eric Niebler.
  • Xpressive Library: Regular expressions that can be written as strings or as expression templates, and that can refer to each other and themselves recursively with the power of context-free grammars, from Eric Niebler.
  • TR1 Library: An implementation of the C++ Technical Report on Standard Library Extensions, from John Maddock. This library does not itself implement the TR1 components, rather it's a thin wrapper that will include your standard library's TR1 implementation (if it has one), otherwise it will include the Boost Library equivalents, and import them into namespace std::tr1. Highlights include: Reference Wrappers, Smart Pointers, result_of, Function Object Binders, Polymorphic function wrappers, Type Traits, Random Number Generators and Distributions, Tuples, Fixed Size Array, Hash Function Objects, Regular Expressions, and Complex Number Additional Algorithms.

Updated Libraries

  • Assign Library:
    • Support for ptr_map<key,T> via the new function ptr_map_insert()
    • Support for initialization of Pointer Containers when the containers hold pointers to an abstract base class.
  • MultiArray Library: Boost.MultiArray now by default provides range-checking for operator[]. Range checking can be disabled by defining the macro BOOST_DISABLE_ASSERTS before including multi_array.hpp.
  • Filesystem Library: Major upgrade in preparation for submission to the C++ Standards Committee for TR2. Changes include:
    • Internationalization, provided by class templates basic_path, basic_filesystem_error, basic_directory_iterator, and basic_directory_entry.
    • Simplification of the path interface by eliminating special constructors to identify native formats.
    • Rationalization of predicate function design, including the addition of several new functions.
    • Clearer specification by reference to POSIX, the ISO/IEEE Single Unix Standard, with provisions for Windows and other operating systems.
    • Preservation of existing user code whenever possible.
    • More efficient directory iteration.
    • Addition of a recursive directory iterator.
  • Function Library: Boost.Function now implements a small buffer optimization, which can drastically improve the performance when copying or construction Boost.Function objects storing small function objects. For instance, bind(&X:foo, &x, _1, _2) requires no heap allocation when placed into a Boost.Function object.
  • Functional/Hash Library
    • Use declarations for standard classes, so that the library doesn't need to include all of their headers
    • Deprecated the <boost/functional/hash/*.hpp> headers.
    • Add support for the BOOST_HASH_NO_EXTENSIONS macro, which disables the extensions to TR1
    • Minor improvements to the hash functions for floating point numbers.
  • Graph Library:
  • Multi-index Containers Library:
  • Pointer Container Library:
    • Support for serialization via Boost.Serialization.
    • Exceptions can be disabled by defining the macro BOOST_PTR_CONTAINER_NO_EXCEPTIONS before including any header. This macro is defined by default if BOOST_NO_EXCEPTIONS is defined.
    • Additional std::auto_ptr<T> overloads added s.t. one can also pass std::auto_ptr<T> instead of only T* arguments to member functions.
    • transfer() now has weaker requirements s.t. one can transfer objects from ptr_container<Derived> to ptr_container<Base>,
  • Python Library:
    • Boost.Python now automatically appends C++ signatures to docstrings. The new docstring_options.hpp header is available to control the content of docstrings.
    • stl_input_iterator, for turning a Python iterable object into an STL input iterator, from Eric Niebler.
  • Python Library: Boost.Python now automatically appends C++ signatures to docstrings. The new docstring_options.hpp header is available to control the content of docstrings. Support for void* conversions is added.
  • Parameter Library:
  • Wave Library:
    • Wave now correctly recognizes pp-number tokens as mandated by the C++ Standard, which are converted to C++ tokens right before they are returned from the library.
    • Several new preprocessing hooks have been added. For a complete description please refer to the related documentation page: The Context Policy.
    • Shared library (dll) support has been added for the generated Wave libraries.
    • The overall error handling has been improved. It is now possible to recover and continue after an error or warning was issued.
    • Support for optional comment and/or full whitespace preservation in the generated output stream has been added.
    • This version also includes a number of bug fixes and usage improvements. For a complete list of changes, see the library change log.