“...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