When I can't use boost? In my opinion boost is great extension to STL,
sometimes very heavyweight and clumsy, but great nevertheless.
Boost is not a library but a collection of largely independent libraries of individual quality. With this in mind, and also taking into account that I'm personally a big fan of most of Boost, here are some reasons I can think of for not using certain Boost libraries:
- Some Boost libraries are redundant since C++11.
- Some libraries are not widely used and thus require expert knowledge in your project which might be expensive to replace when an employee leaves the company.
- Company guidelines which developers have to obey more for political than for technical reasons.
- You have no guarantee that any Boost library will be continued to be maintained in the future. Standard C++ code written for some compiler today will very likely continue to work fine with a newer compiler by the same vendor 10 years from now, for simple commercial reasons. With Boost, you have to hope that enough competent people will have any interest in long-term maintenance.
- No Boost library is documented as extensively, with so much material in countless books and on the internet, as the C++ standard library. Who will support you if you have some really exotic problem with a particular library? Surely with standard C++ your chances of finding people with the same problem (and existing solutions for the problem) are much higher.
- Debugging some Boost code can be more difficult than debugging code that uses the standard library.
