Boost 1.35 approaching and other news

The Boost developers are in the process of getting the libraries stabilised for the upcoming Boost 1.35 release. Right now the branch that is being prepared can be found at https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/branches/release

If you're on Windows then, like me, you're probably not used to having to build libraries yourself. It always takes me an age to work out how to do a build. Here is what I'm doing, hopefully this will help some others too.

Firstly I use TortoiseSVN to check out the above URL into E:\Dev\Boost\src. Simply use TortoiseSVN to do an update every few days when you're ready to try a newer version.

The next commands I keep in a .bat file in my Boost directory (one level above where I check out the release branch), but here they are explained.

Set up the Microsoft Visual C++ environment for command line builds. This assumes MSVC 8.1 and you used the default install path:

call “c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat”

We need to build BJam first, so go into its directory and start its build script.

cd src\tools\jam
call build_dist.bat

When that is built we need it in the root of the Boost source code and we need to get back there to do the next steps.

copy boost-jam-3.1.16-1-ntx86\bjam.exe ..\..\..
cd ..\..\..

We need to build the other tools that are needed to build some of the libraries:

bjam —toolset=msvc-8.1 tools

We then build Boost itself. This will build and install Boost into E:\Dev\Boost\. The options that I'm using mean:

• Build both release and debug builds.
• Create shared libraries (DLLs).
• Build for multi-threaded MSVC builds.
• Do not build Python libraries.

These last two seem to be the best options for MSVC 8.1 projects.

It should be safe to install this to the same directory as an earlier release, but you may want to keep it separate anyway so you can delete the install directory before rebuilding after an update.

bjam —toolset=msvc-8.1 —prefix=..\install debug release runtime-link=shared threading=multi install —without-python

Bugs and errors can be reported via http://svn.boost.org/ and the Boost mailing lists.

Other news

The site has been pretty quiet lately, the quiet nicely interrupted by Port4l posting his thread safe singleton. I've got a couple of little snippets I want to post and have some changes to make to tidy up some of the earlier ones now that they can make use of new 1.35 libraries (like Boost.FunctionTypes).

There is also a face lift for the site. I want to keep the pages as light as possible, but they ought to look at least a little nicer than they do now.