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Boost is meant to be the standard non-standard C++ library that every C++ user can use. Is it reasonable to assume it's available for an open source C++ project, or is it a large dependency too far?
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Boost is licensed under its own free, open-source license, known as the Boost Software License.
Boost has been used in C++03 for years, so its the natural choice to use boost versions still in C++11 which are now part of std::, in order to be able to interface with C++03. But also some people will be happy to use C++11, and prefer the Standard Library over using boost.
After 20 years of active Boost development, it's now recognized as a very powerful C++ library, for each major version many C++ libraries from the community were added. The Boost reviewers have an advanced C++ skills and their contributions guarantee a high quality for many years.
6.1 Link From Within the Visual Studio IDE Right-click example in the Solution Explorer pane and select Properties from the resulting pop-up menu. In Configuration Properties > Linker > Additional Library Directories, enter the path to the Boost binaries, e.g. C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_55_0\lib\.
Basically your question boils down to “is it reasonable to have [free library xyz] as a dependency for a C++ open source project.”
Now consider the following quote from Stroustrup and the answer is really a no-brainer:
Without a good library, most interesting tasks are hard to do in C++; but given a good library, almost any task can be made easy
Assuming that this is correct (and in my experience, it is) then writing a reasonably-sized C++ project without dependencies is downright unreasonable.
Developing this argument further, the one C++ dependency (apart from system libraries) that can reasonably be expected on a (developer's) client system is the Boost libraries. I know that they aren't but it's not an unreasonable presumption for a software to make.
If a software can't even rely on Boost, it can't rely on any library.
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Take a look at http://www.boost.org/doc/tools.html. Specifically the bcp utility would come in handy if you would like to embed your boost-dependencies into your project. An excerpt from the web site:
"The bcp utility is a tool for extracting subsets of Boost, it's useful for Boost authors who want to distribute their library separately from Boost, and for Boost users who want to distribute a subset of Boost with their application.bcp can also report on which parts of Boost your code is dependent on, and what licences are used by those dependencies."
Of course this could have some drawbacks - but at least you should be aware of the possibility to do so.
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