Chapter 7. Boost.Container

Boost.Container library implements several well-known containers, including STL containers. The aim of the library is to offer advanced features not present in standard containers or to offer the latest standard draft features for compilers that don't comply with the latest C++ standard.

In short, what does Boost.Container offer?

Access to many of the latest C++ standard features and have an easy code migration when you change your compiler.
A portable, high performance implementation that works when compiling without exceptions support and offers customized error handling when a container needs to signal an exceptional error.
Users obtain a more uniform performance across all plataforms, including SCARY iterators.
Userful polymorphic allocators and memory resources, including implementation and emulation for pre-C++17 compilers
New advanced features (e.g. recursive containers) and configurability options for containers.
Containers support stateful allocators and are compatible with Boost.Interprocess (they can be safely placed in shared memory) offering improved performance vs standard containers when using Boost.Interprocess.
You have very useful non-standard containers like [stable/static/small]_vector, flat_[multi]set/map, devector or segtor.
If you work on multiple platforms, you'll have a portable behaviour without depending on the std-lib implementation conformance for each platform. Some examples:
Extended functionality beyond the standard based on user feedback to improve code performance.
Configuration options that allow tweaking containers to fit users needs.
The library offers new useful containers:
- flat_map, flat_set, flat_multimap and flat_multiset: drop-in replacements for standard associative containers but more memory friendly and with faster searches.
- stable_vector: a std::list and std::vector hybrid container: vector-like random-access iterators and list-like iterator stability in insertions and erasures.
- static_vector: a vector-like container that internally embeds (statically allocates) all needed memory up to the maximum capacity. Maximum capacity can't be increased and it's specified at compile time.
- small_vector: a vector-like container that internally embeds (statically allocates) a minimum amount of memory, but dynamically allocates elements when capacity has to be increased. This minimum capacity is specified at compile time.
- devector: is a hybrid of the standard vector and deque containers. It offers cheap (amortized constant time) insertion at both the front and back ends.
- segtor: a sequence container with segmented (block-based) storage like deque but only growth at the back; constant-time push_back/pop_back, random access.
- slist: the classic pre-standard singly linked list implementation offering constant-time size(). Note that C++11 forward_list has no size().

Building Boost.Container

For most functionalities, there is no need to compile Boost.Container, since it's a header-only library, just include your Boost header directory in your compiler include path except if you use:

Extended Allocators
Some Polymorphic Memory Resources classes.

Those exceptions are are implemented as a separately compiled library, so in those cases you must install binaries in a location that can be found by your linker. If you followed the Boost Getting Started instructions, that's already been done for you.

For the CMake build system, the project (CMakeLists.txt) contains the BOOST_CONTAINER_HEADER_ONLY option that can be set to ON to build the library as header-only or OFF to build it as a separately compiled library.

Tested compilers

Boost.Container requires a decent C++03 compatibility. Some compilers known to work are:

Visual C++ >= 10.0
GCC >= 4.8

Boost C++ Libraries