Migrating from Boost to the Standard Library for C++11

Question

I am new user of the boost library. I find my self thinking more about adopting boost for a number of reasons. From what I can tell, it seems that the boost library is a sort of skunkworks sandbox where various C++ TR features for upcoming standardization are tried out before being adopted by the C++ committee - think boost::filesystem and boost::regex,

As an example, I was trying out some of the C++11 regex features in visual studio via the #include header - this worked great until I ported to a target power pc platform, which, at the time used CodeSourcery's GCC 4.7.3. Unfortunately, I realized that at run-time, that much of the regex implementation was incomplete or empty (even thought it compiled) - With a bit of homework, I should have realized this beforehand, however now that GCC 4.8.x is out, the implementation is part of the v3 standard C++ library so it is a different story now.

In an ideal world, the standard library should be like developing for Java - write once, deploy everywhere - but that is not a reality. I would eventually like to move to the standard library implementation rather than Boost's regex and filesystem implementations.

My question given the above regex history, is how should developers use boost, is it possible to do a simple search and replace of the boost headers and namespaces when the features are adopted by the standard library or are there more many things to consider. I would like to use pure C++11 code without dependency on 3rd party libraries.

Answer 1

Let's begin with your statement

I would like to use pure C++11 code without dependency on 3rd party libraries.

It is clear that this is not possible now. You will have to use 3rd party libraries for any non-trivial program.

Unfortunately, C++ with Boost is not a platform also. You need 3rd party libraries to do things available out of the box in languages like Java, C#, Python etc.

So, you have to select libraries according to your requirements: performance, supported platforms, multithreading etc.

Again, Boost shouldn't be your default choice. It is not that useful now as it was 10 years ago. Most of must have stuff went into C++ standard library already.

If you support existing C++ codebase, find the best C++ library for your needs (e.g. re2 for regex). If you start a new project, I would suggest using Qt as a platform.

Answer 2

The amount of work required to move from a Boost library to its C++11 conterpart depends on the degree of C++11 conformance of a particular Boost library. In the simplest case it can be a matter of including another set of headers and using another namespace.

In a more complicated case, Boost library may have some subtle incompliancy with C++11 (eg. in Boost.Thread V1 ~thread used to call detach()) - such things might "silently" break the code correctness, but they are easy to fix.

Finally, Boost library may implement funcionality that doesn't exist in C++11 (eg. boost::bind can be extended using get_pointer function). Apparantly, porting such a code to C++11 would be quite not trivial.