bsod’s braindumps

Why boost is impractical

In the C++ programming world, the peer reviewed boost libraries are a gold standard to measure every other library on. Several parts of this library are being made standard in the next C++ standard, C++0x.

So, everybody would be using boost, right?

Well, no… You see, boost is a BIG library. It installs 64Mb worth of header files alone, 24Mb of libraries, and takes 20 minutes to compile on my machine, an average dual-core.

Now suppose I have a simple C++ program, a few files long, that uses some boost to parse the commandline. that would build in some seconds… why would i wait for 20 minutes for the code to arrive to simply parse the commandline? I’m not very happy that parsing the commandline this way requires you to redistribute a 300K+ .dll file.

GNU getopt on the other hand, compiles to less than 5K of code that you link in directly, so no .dll needed.

And they both do more or less the same thing. Sure, boost.program_options does a lot more, but it just is too excessive. And that’s why boost is impractical. You want a sip, but you get a bucketload shoved down your throat