Guidelines for using BOOST

Question

I am planning to use boost libraries, as it is quiet rich, and will save lots of time. But my question is, what are the guidelines i have to follow, so that

I can replace some part of boost with standard C++ as and when they are supported, considering so many new features are coming in C++11.
Also, how to encapsulate them in a way so that i have to change least when i change platform/compiler/boost version.
Also is there a category which suggest, which portion of the library to use and avoid, considering stability and standard.

Check out this Answers about why **not ** to use BOOST. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1226206/is-there-a-reason-to-not-use-boost — Hamzah khammash, Dec 08 '11 at 14:12
@Hamzahkhammash thanks for the link. It answered most of my concerns. Hope i could have selected this as an answer. — rakesh, Dec 09 '11 at 07:13

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 08 '11 at 10:38

For questions 1 and 2 the answer is relatively straightforward through boost itself - the boost::tr1 library wraps the original "TR1" (technical report 1 I think) parts of the C++11 standard in a way that you will get your native implementation if it's available or the boost implementation if it's not, in the std::tr1 namespace.

For 3: all libraries in boost are quite stable, though some are not ideal (boost::python has memory leaks when embedding python, for example), and some are very complex (spirit, MPL) and you may want to avoid them for those reasons.

Guidelines for using BOOST

1 Answers1