boost 1.61 - a short overview

published at 17.05.2016 21:27 by Jens Weller
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Last week during C++Now, boost 1.61 was released. This is the first release in 2016, and with 4 new libraries a really important one.

New Libraries

With compute, boost has now a library for accessing the GPU. A very good introduction to this library was given at last years C++Now.

The Boost Compute library provides a C++ interface to multi-core CPU and GPGPU computing platforms based on OpenCL.

The new DLL Library provides facilities for loading and interacting with DLLs in boost code, this library can be used to implement plugins easily and crossplatform.

With C++11 new features came also to the template meta programming world to C++, which even improved more with C++14. This change is embraced by the new hana library from Louis Dionne. He gave at last years CppCon a very good presentation about this new library, which most likely will replace boost MPL and Fusion in a not to far future.

The 4th new library is metaparse, presented at C++Now 2012. This library allows you to create compile time parsers:

Metaparse is a parser generator library for template metaprograms. The purpose of this library is to support the creation of parsers that parse at compile time. This library is intended to be used for embedded domain specific language creation for C++. The input of the generated parser is a compile time string, see string. The result of the parsing process is either an error or any other result the writer of the parser specifies.

Changes & Bugfixes

There are plenty of fixes in this release. GCC 6.1 is not yet fully supported, only GCC 6.0 is listed in the tested compilers on a few platforms. So expect the next boost version to support GCC 6.x branch.

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