Chapter 9. Boost.Container

Ion Gaztanaga

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

Introduction

Boost.Container library implements several well-known containers, including STL containers. The aim of the library is to offer advanced features not present in standard containers or to offer the latest standard draft features for compilers that don't comply with the latest C++ standard.

In short, what does Boost.Container offer?

Emplacement and move semantics are implemented, including emulation for pre-C++11 compilers.
Polymorphic allocators and memory resources, including implementation and emulation for pre-C++17 compilers
New advanced features (e.g. recursive containers) and configurability options container.configurable_containers for containers.
Containers support stateful allocators and are compatible with Boost.Interprocess (they can be safely placed in shared memory).
Users obtain a more uniform performance across all plataforms, including SCARY iterators.
The library offers new useful containers:
- flat_map, flat_set, flat_multimap and flat_multiset: drop-in replacements for standard associative containers but more memory friendly and with faster searches.
- stable_vector: a std::list and std::vector hybrid container: vector-like random-access iterators and list-like iterator stability in insertions and erasures.
- static_vector: a vector-like container that internally embeds (statically allocates) all needed memory up to the maximum capacity. Maximum capacity can't be increased and it's specified at compile time.
- small_vector: a vector-like container that internally embeds (statically allocates) a minimum amount of memory, but dynamically allocates elements when capacity has to be increased. This minimum capacity is specified at compile time.
- devector: is a hybrid of the standard vector and deque containers. It offers cheap (amortized constant time) insertion at both the front and back ends.
- slist: the classic pre-standard singly linked list implementation offering constant-time size(). Note that C++11 forward_list has no size().

Building Boost.Container

There is no need to compile Boost.Container , since it's a header-only library, just include your Boost header directory in your compiler include path except if you use :

Extended Allocators
Some Polymorphic Memory Resources classes.

Those exceptions are are implemented as a separately compiled library, so in those cases you must install binaries in a location that can be found by your linker. If you followed the Boost Getting Started instructions, that's already been done for you.

Tested compilers

Boost.Container requires a decent C++03 compatibility. Some compilers known to work are:

Visual C++ >= 10.0
GCC >= 4.8

Last revised: August 05, 2021 at 09:53:44 GMT