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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

ISO standardization also makes things too static at times. For instance, the hash table omission accident gave us non-standard hash tables for years, until TR1 was finally settled.

Boost is nice, but usually only ancient versions are available on clusters (where RHEL 4 or even 3 is still common). The more complete the standard language library, the better.

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You can always compile boost and install it locally, the full 64bit version only takes about 100MB:

  $ du -hsc boost/1.45.0/*
  68M     boost/1.45.0/include
  37M     boost/1.45.0/lib
  104M    total

Add cmake/autoconf and it's fairly trivial to make it work with your software or even ship it with your source code: after all the Boost license is fairly permissive.

Yes, that is what we do. We include a Boost subset. But that shouldn't be necessary. It's extra maintenance, duplication, and annoying.

On what distributions do you find ancient versions of boost but recent versions of GCC? If the standardization process moved faster you'd still have to wait.

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