When Boost Came into Picture

It is not long after I use STL before I realize it has lots of potential that is not fully realized. It has useful construct like for_each but it's use is hampered by the fact that we need to make a Functor for each function that we would to "inject" to containers, no fun. There's also auto_ptr that has a promising future in helping use deal with nasty memory problems, but alas it's very raw to be useful.

Then comes boost. I find this library pick up some of what STL and standard C++ left off. It helps extend some hard-to-use construct into something that can be used in daily coding with more ease, thus making it's adoption more rapid. It enable us to use for_each the way most of us had in mind i.e: just "plug" a unnamed (lambda) function to it. It adds higher level abstractions and myriad of tools that help tame the complexity working in C++.

What I feel is another interesting feature of it is that it does things in a way that is very align with STL and Standard C++. It feels like an extension of the language rather than a library. It also has a little portion of something that looks like Foundation Library that we typically find in language like Java or C# i.e: Filesystem handling, Thread, Time.

C++ with it's feature like template promise something that STL help realize to some extent. Boost then pick up what STL left off into something more practical, useful and accessible.