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Comment by bluetomcat | Hacker News Reader

You can still use it as "C with classes" and STL containers and get a lot done. For that, you don't need to know any template wizardry or the subtleties of rvalue references.

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Is it really possible to avoid encountering boost or another template heavy framework?

Yup. In fact, boost is often a code smell, especially in modern C++. The standard library packs a great deal of functionality now, and things like boost threading aren’t needed anymore. Lambda functions (closures) and range-based for loops also greatly reduced the need for boost.

It’s still useful, just not super critical anymore. You won’t feel like you’re missing out if you avoid it.

Saying that boost is a code smell suggests that std is a code smell too, since often std gets its packages directly from boost.

Having something like Boost these days is quite far from essential and unless it was in a company's stack already or someone loves it I think you're unlikely to find it in greenfield projects.

Except if some policy enforces C++11 or C++14, especially in embedded systems, where compilers might be years behind in following the specs. For example, gcc has (almost) full C++17 support starting from version 8, which might seem old enough to be omnipresent, but still some QNX-based distributions might have stuck with 5.x.

Of course, especially if you want your code to compile within reasonable time.

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