Hop on over to boost.org and see for yourself; it’s a collection of neat libraries that are all peer-reviewed, and adhere to the traditional (and standardized) C++ paradigm. I like it a lot.
But jeez louise. Did they really have to make their own build tool? Boost.Jam is unbelievably complicated, and more importantly, all the boost libraries combined really aren’t that large. It wouldn’t have taken — relatively speaking, of course — all that much more effort to just use autoconf and make, like *every other project*. When bjam works, nobody cares that it sucks. When it doesn’t work…well, there’s not much to be done about it if you don’t want to expend a ton of time on it. Really.
Another thing – I think one thing that still prevents C++ from being more widely deployed is the lack of really great libraries in the standard. Boost is working toward that, but many, many people do not even try to use boost just becuase of the stupid bjam tool. I would bet money that boost could instantly pick up a bunch more users if a simple Makefile were available.
Andrew Connell
Contact