Boost considered harmful? [closed]

Answer 1

I disagree. No-one would suggest that you should dive in to smart pointers without a thorough understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, but used sensibly they can remove a whole host of common errors. Moreover, Boost is high-quality production code from which a C++ novice can learn a great deal, in terms of design as much as implementation. It's not all hugely complicated, either, and you can pick and choose the bits you need.

Answer 2

Quite frankly, for beginners I think boost isn't that well-suited. I think a beginner is better off understanding how the basics work before moving up the food chain using higher level tool/libs like boost or even STL. At the beginner stage it is not about productivity, it is about understanding. I think knowing how pointers work, being able for instance to manually create a linked list or sort one are part of the fundamentals that each programmer should learn.

Answer 3

Do you know how the compiler works ? Do you know how the OS works ? Do you know how the processor works ? Do you know how electronics works ? Do you know how electricity works ?

At some point you are using a black box, the question is, "is my ignorance problematic for what I am currently doing?".

If you have the taste for knowledge that's a great thing - and I clearly consider that a plus when interviewing engineers - but don't forget the finality of your work : build systems that solve problems.

Answer 4

I agree with you, high level libraries hide things from you. It might be a good idea in the short run, but in the long run, the novice will have severe gaps in their understanding of the language.

It's easy for us non-novices to say "just use this library" because we've been down that long hard road of learning things the hard way, and naturally we want to save someone else the trouble of doing the same.

Novices SHOULD have to struggle with rolling their own low-level solutions to problems. And then, when they've got a better understanding of how their own solution worked, they can use the third-party solution, confident that they have some idea of what's going on under the hood. They'll use that library better!

I think this is a broader subject than just being about Boost. I completely regret picking up VB as my first language. If I had just started with ugly, hard to learn c, I'd be years ahead of where I am now.

Answer 5

Scoped and dynamic resource ownership are general basic neeeds and boost's implementation of'em is very good an highly recommended. I use them a lot and they work fine.

Answer 6

I disagree. Of course you will always know more about the internal workings of everything when coding it from scratch than when using 3rd party libraries. But time and money are limited, and using good 3rd party libraries such as boost is a very good way to save your resources.