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Portability

A huge effort has been made to port the library to as many compilers as possible.

Full support for built-in arrays require that the compiler supports class template partial specialization. For non-conforming compilers there might be a chance that it works anyway thanks to workarounds in the type traits library. Visual C++ 6/7.0 has a limited support for arrays: as long as the arrays are of built-in type it should work.

Notice also that some compilers cannot do function template ordering properly. In that case one must rely of range_iterator and a single function definition instead of overloaded versions for const and non-const arguments. So if one cares about old compilers, one should not pass rvalues to the functions.

For maximum portability you should follow these guidelines:

  1. do not use built-in arrays,
  2. do not pass rvalues to begin(), end() and iterator_range Range constructors and assignment operators,
  3. use const_begin() and const_end() whenever your code by intention is read-only; this will also solve most rvalue problems,
  4. do not rely on ADL:

    • if you overload functions, include that header before the headers in this library,
    • put all overloads in namespace boost.

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