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by tboneatx 3592 days ago
I agree 100% with Linus, especially the boost comment. It was heavily used in a project I worked on and "boost" soon became a curse word.
2 comments

I don't agree with Linus, but yes, boost is horrible.
I don't agree with you, boost is great.
Rather than continue with unsupported opinion, I'd rather make the specific point that Boost served well as incubator and proving ground for such constructs as shared_ptr and unique_ptr, which have been subsumed into the C++ standard as undeniably huge improvements. As a result, the unfortunate abortion auto_ptr has finally been able to be consigned to a well-deserved resting place in Hell.

Other parts of Boost have been considerably less impressive, and virtually nobody uses them. I struggled at length trying to get Boost::Parameter to work, with zero success. Boost::Format at least works, but ends up cumbersome, and does not approach the usability of {} formatting in Python.

You should not really judge a tool by the bad use the people make of it. Hammers are perfectly fine with nail but they are horrible at cutting bread