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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
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provide reference implementations so that Boost
libraries are suitable for eventual standardization.
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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
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Background: The Background Information
page has introductory material to help those
educating their organization about Boost.
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Standards Committee Library Working Group,
participation has expanded to include thousands of
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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.
- Statechart
Library: Arbitrarily complex finite state
machines can be implemented in easily readable and
maintainable C++ code, from Andreas Huber.
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. A bug in
multi_array::resize() related
to storage orders was fixed.
-
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:
-
Parameter
Library:
- Every ArgumentPack is now a valid MPL
Forward Sequence.
- Support for unnamed arguments (those whose
keyword is deduced from their types) is
added.
- Support for named and unnamed template
arguments is added.
- New overload generation macros solve the
forwarding problem directly.
- See also the Python library changes,
below.
-
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.
- Support for
void* conversions
is added.
- Integrated support for wrapping C++
functions built with the parameter library;
keyword names are automatically known to
docsstrings.
-
Smart
Pointers Library:
-
String Algorithm Library:
lexicographical_compare
join
-
New comparison predicates
is_less , is_not_greater .
-
Negative indexes support (like Perl) in various algorihtms
(
*_head/tail , *_nth ).
-
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 a warning was
issued.
- Support for optional comment and/or full
whitespace preservation in the generated output
stream has been added.
- The Wave library now performs automatic
include guard detection to avoid accessing header
files more than once, if appropriate.
- Full interactive mode has been added to the Wave
tool. Now the Wave tool can be used just like Python
or Perl for instance to interactively try out your
BOOST_PP macros. Additionally it is now possible to
load and save the current state of an interactive session
(macro tables et.al.).
- The overall performance has been improved by upto
30-40%, depending on the concrete files to process.
- Support for new pragmas has been added allowing to control certain library features from inside the preprocessed sources (partial output redirection, control of generated whitespace and #line directives).
- This version also includes a number of bug
fixes and usage improvements. For a complete
list of changes, see the libraries change log.
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