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The Boost web site provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries. The emphasis is on libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library. One goal is to establish "existing practice" and provide reference implementations so that the Boost libraries are suitable for eventual standardization. Several Boost libraries will be included in the C++ Standards Committee's upcoming C++ Standard Library Technical Report.

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

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If you are interested in becoming a member of Boost, please do so by joining our main developers mailing list. Discussions include both technical and site-related issues, and members are encouraged to participate in formal reviews of proposed libraries. There is also a users mailing list.

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Latest News

????? 2003 - Version 1.31.0

• A unified Boost Software License has been developed and will replace the individual licenses for most Boost libraries. The new license offers better legal protection for both users and developers, and should speed user's legal reviews of Boost libraries. Dave Abrahams led the Boost effort to develop better licensing. The legal team was led by Diane Cabell, Director, Clinical Programs, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School. Devin Smith, attorney, Nixon Peabody LLP, wrote the Boost License. Eva Chan, Harvard Law School, contributed analysis of issues and drafts of various legal documents.
• Variant Library added - Safe, generic, stack-based discriminated union container, from Eric Friedman and Itay Maman.
• Filesystem Library: Several added functions, including improved checking for directory and file name portability.
• Random Number Library: interface changed to C++ library TR proposal, from Jens Maurer.

August 19, 2003 - Version 1.30.2 (bugfix release)

• Boost Consulting is now hosting Boost CVS mirrors - see our download page.
• Backported changes to the config system, to better handle new compiler releases.
• Bugs in regression reporting in subproject tests were fixed.
• Tests are now run in the context of the user's PATH environment settings
• msvc-stlport and intel-win32-stlport toolsets now build static libraries with multithreading enabled, to be compatible with the STLPort builds.
• intel-win32 toolset now handles wchar_t correctly when intel is installed over msvc6.
• Backported fixes from the main trunk which prevent errors building the Boost.Test library in its default configuration.
• Backported portability improvements for checked_delete.
• Locale support for metrowerks (requiring a statically-linked runtime) is more uniformly handled.
• Backported conversion/lexical_cast's wchar_t fixes from the main trunk.
• intel-linux-tools: added rt to FINDLIBS in order to make the clock_gettime() function available (backport of a patch in CVS HEAD).
• regression/compiler_status.cpp: backported fixes in error log links generation.

August 12, 2003 - ALERT

Significant problems were found in the 1.30.1 release, so it has been withdrawn from the website. These problems mostly take the form of missing files due to an error by the release manager in using CVS to tag the release. We expect to release Version 1.30.2 in a few days. Stay tuned.

Until then, you may want to get the RC_1_30_0 branch (which, with only very slight modification, will become version 1.30.2) from our CVS repository or the CVS mirror at Boost Consulting.

August 4, 2003 - Version 1.30.1 (bugfix release)

Fixes were made to the following libraries:

• The Boost.Lambda library is now usable with gcc-2.95.2
• Boost.Spirit:
  • Fixed. Using MSVC++6 (SP5), calling the assign action with a string value on parsers using the file_iterator will not work.
  • Fixed: using assign semantic action in a grammar with a multi_pass iterator adaptor applied to an std::istream_iterator resulted in a failure to compile under msvc 7.0.
  • Fixed: There is a bug in the range_run<CharT>::set (range<CharT> const& r) function in "boost/spirit/utility/impl/chset/range_run.ipp".
  • Fixed: handling of trailing whitespace bug (ast_parse/pt_parse related)
  • Fixed: comment_p and end of data bug
  • Fixed: Most trailing space bug
  • Fixed: chset<>::operator~(range<>) bug, operator&(chset<>, range<>) bug, operator&(range<>, chset<>) bug
  • Fixed: impl::detach_clear bug
  • Fixed: mismatch closure return type bug
  • Fixed: access_node_d[] and access_match_d[] iterator bugs
  • Fixed a bug regarding threadsafety of Phoenix/Spirit closures.
• The Boost Template Metaprogramming Library (MPL)'s typeof implementation is now compatible with Metrowerks CodeWarrior Pro8.
• Boost.Function: workaround for the new Borland patch (version 0x564) and MSVC++ .NET 2003.
• Boost.Config, Boost.Format, and Boost.Regex have been adjusted to avoid warnings with GCC-3.3, and Boost.Format also now works with string types other than std::string.
• Smart Pointers
  • checked_delete now works on more platforms
  • Compatibility with the SunPro compiler
  • Added missing #includes.
• Boost.Python
  • warning suppression for finicky compilers
  • fixed a crashing bug in the raw_function facility when no keyword arguments were passed.
  • Improved conversion of NULL shared_ptrs to Python.

March 19, 2003 - Version 1.30.0

• Filesystem Library added - Portable paths, iteration over directories, and other useful filesystem operations, from Beman Dawes.
• Optional Library added - A discriminated-union wrapper for optional values, from Fernando Cacciola.
• Interval Library added - Extends the usual arithmetic functions to mathematical intervals, from Guillaume Melquiond, Hervé Brönnimann and Sylvain Pion.
• MPL added - Template metaprogramming framework of compile-time algorithms, sequences and metafunction classes, from Aleksey Gurtovoy.
• Spirit Library added - An LL (unlimited lookahead) parser framework that represents parsers directly as EBNF grammars in inlined C++ source code, complete with semantic actions, ASTs and much more, from Joel de Guzman and team.
• Smart Pointers Library - cast functions are now spelled static_pointer_cast / dynamic_pointer_cast ; enable_shared_from_this added; shared_ptr::shared_ptr(), shared_ptr::reset(), weak_ptr::weak_ptr(), weak_ptr::reset() no longer throw; get_deleter added; weak_ptr::get() removed; make_shared is now spelled weak_ptr::lock() ; intrusive_ptr documentation added; some experimental undocumented shared_ptr features have been removed; a page describing some smart pointer programming techniques has been added.
• boost/assert.hpp, boost/current_function.hpp, boost/throw_exception.hpp, boost/checked_delete.hpp have been documented.
• Date-Time Library - several fixes and small additions including an interface change to partial_date. See Date-Time Change History for more details.
• Function Library - added support for assignment to zero (to clear) and comparison against zero (to check if empty).
• Operators Library - now takes advantage of named return value optimization (NRVO) when available, from Daniel Frey.
• Regression Tests - Much expanded, plus a very nice summary page from Rene Rivera.
• Test Library - introduced following new facilities:
  • Automatic registration of unit tests
  • XML log format
  • XML report format
  • BOOST_CHECK_NO_THROW test tool
  • BOOST_BITWISE_CHECK test tool
  For complete list of changes see Test Library release notes
• Many fixes and enhancements to other libraries.

October 10, 2002 - Version 1.29.0

• Date-Time Library added - Dates, times, leap seconds, infinity, and more, from Jeff Garland.
• Dynamic Bitset added - A runtime sized version of the std::bitset class from Jeremy Siek and Chuck Allison.
• Format Library added - Type-safe 'printf-like' format operations, from Samuel Krempp.
• Function Library: Major syntactic changes have been made. Some old syntax and little-used features have been deprecated (and will be removed shortly), and the syntax for the boost::function class template has been greatly improved on conforming compilers. Please see the compatibility note for more information.
• Multi-array Library added - Multidimensional containers and adaptors for arrays of contiguous data, from Ron Garcia.
• Preprocessor Library: Major upgrade, from Paul Mensonides.
• Python Library - Version 2 is released, from Dave Abrahams and others. This is a major rewrite which works on many more compilers and platforms, with a completely new interface and lots of new features. Boost.Python v2 requires Python 2.2 or later.
• Signals Library added - Managed signals & slots callback implementation, from Doug Gregor.
• Test Library: Major new version, including full unit test capabilities, from Gennadiy Rozental.
• uBLAS Library added - Basic linear algebra for dense, packed and sparse matrices, from Joerg Walter and Mathias Koch.

May 15, 2002 - Version 1.28.0

• The Boost mailing lists are now also accessible as newsgroups.
• A powerful mailing list archive has been contributed by the ActiveState Programmer Network.
• Lambda Library added, from Jaakko Järvi and Gary Powell. Define small unnamed function objects at the actual call site:
  
      for_each(a.begin(), a.end(), std::cout << _1 << ' ');
   
• I/O State Saver Library added - Save I/O state to prevent jumbled data, from Daryle Walker.
• Configuration Library: User code should not use BOOST_NO_LIMITS.
• Random Number Library: Avoid compiler warnings
• Smart Pointers Library: Added shared_polymorphic_cast and shared_polymorphic_downcast.
• Function Library: Now supports function objects with the unary & operator overloaded.
• Utility Library: Added addressof() function.
• The usual small fixes and tweaks.

February 5, 2002 - Version 1.27.0

• Python Library: Scott Snyder contributed inplace operator support.
• Integer Library: Daryle Walker contributed enhancements to the type selection templates, and added new compile-time bit mask, binary logarithm, and extrema templates.
• Function Library: user may request that boost::function objects store a reference to a function object target instead of a copy, using ref. Stateless objects are optimized so that they require no dynamic storage.
• Quaternions: added support for GCC 2.95.x.
• Octonions: added support for GCC 2.95.x.
• Smart Pointers Library: Peter Dimov contributed a new implementation that fixes some bugs and adds some features including thread safety when manipulating the use count, custom delete functions, a new weak_ptr, and shared_static_cast and shared_dynamic_cast.
• Preprocessor Library: changed macro prefix from BOOST_PREPROCESSOR to BOOST_PP, added support for list data structure manipulation, added examples, made library ANSI C friendly, added generalized repetition and iteration primitives, improved reference manual.
• Threads Library: Mac Carbon implementation contributed by Mac Murrett.
• Minor fixes to many libraries.