1.1   What's Here

This document is designed to be an extremely gentle introduction, so we included a fair amount of material that may already be very familiar to you. To keep things simple, we also left out some information intermediate and advanced users will probably want. At the end of this document, we'll refer you on to resources that can help you pursue these topics further.

1.2   Preliminaries

We use one typographic convention that might not be immediately obvious: italic text in examples is meant as a descriptive placeholder for something else, usually information that you'll provide. For example:

$ echo "My name is your name"

Here you're expected to imagine replacing the text “your name” with your actual name.

We identify Unix and its variants such as Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS collectively as *nix. If you're not targeting Microsoft Windows, the instructions for *nix users will probably work for you. Cygwin users working from the Cygwin bash prompt should also follow the *nix instructions. To use your Cygwin compiler from the Windows command prompt, follow the instructions for Windows users.

Although Boost supports a wide variety of Windows compilers (including older Microsoft compilers), most instructions for Windows users cover only the Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. We hope that gives you enough information to adapt them for your own compiler or IDE.

5.1   Build on *nix

In the directory where you saved example.cpp, issue the following command:

c++ -I /path/to/boost_1_34_0 example.cpp -o example

To test the result, type:

echo 1 2 3 | ./example

next...

5.2   Build from the Visual Studio Command Prompt

From your computer's Start menu, if you are a Visual Studio 2005 user, select

All Programs > Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 > Visual Studio Tools > Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt

or, if you're a Visual Studio .NET 2003 user, select

All Programs > Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 > Visual Studio .NET Tools > Visual Studio .NET 2003 Command Prompt

to bring up a special command prompt window set up for the Visual Studio compiler. In that window, type the following command and hit the return key:

cl /EHsc /Ipath\to\boost_1_34_0 path\to\example.cpp

To test the result, type:

echo 1 2 3 | example

next...

5.3   Build in the Visual Studio IDE

• From Visual Studio's File menu, select New > Project…
• In the left-hand pane of the resulting New Project dialog, select Visual C++ > Win32.
• In the right-hand pane, select Win32 Console Application (VS8.0) or Win32 Console Project (VS7.1).
• In the name field, enter “example”
• Right-click example in the Solution Explorer pane and select Properties from the resulting pop-up menu
• In Configuration Properties > C/C++ > General > Additional Include Directories, enter the path to the Boost root directory, e.g. C:\Program`` \ ``Files\boost\boost_1_34_0.
• In Configuration Properties > C/C++ > Precompiled Headers, change Use Precompiled Header (/Yu) to Not Using Precompiled Headers. [5]
• Replace the contents of the example.cpp generated by the IDE with the example code above.
• From the Build menu, select Build Solution.

To test your application, hit the F5 key and type the following into the resulting window, followed by the return key:

1 2 3

Then hold down the control key and press "Z", followed by the return key.

5.4   Errors and Warnings

Don't be alarmed if you see compiler warnings from Boost headers. We try to eliminate them, but doing so isn't always practical. [4]

Errors are another matter. If you're seeing compilation errors at this point in the tutorial, check to be sure you've copied the example program correctly and that you've correctly identified the Boost root directory.

6.1   Install Visual Studio Binaries

The Windows installer supplied by Boost Consulting will download and install pre-compiled binaries into the lib\ subdirectory of the boost root, typically C:\Program`` \ ``Files\boost\boost_1_34_0\lib\.

next...

6.2   Build and Install *nix Binaries

Issue the following commands in the shell (don't type $; it represents the shell's prompt):

$ cd /path/to/boost_1_34_0
$ ./configure --help

Select your configuration options and invoke ./configure again. Unless you have write permission in your system's /usr/local/ directory, you'll probably want to at least use

$ ./configure --prefix=path/to/installation/prefix

to install somewhere else. Finally,

$ make install

which will leave Boost binaries in the lib/ subdirectory of your installation prefix. You will also find a copy of the Boost headers in the include/ subdirectory of the installation prefix, so you can henceforth use that directory as an #include path in place of the Boost root directory.

next...

6.3   Build and Install Other Binaries

If you're not using Visual C++ 7.1 or 8.0, or you're a *nix user who wants want to build with a toolset other than your system's default, or if you want a nonstandard variant build of Boost (e.g. optimized, but with debug symbols), you'll need to use Boost.Build to create your own binaries.

Boost.Build is a text-based system for developing, testing, and installing software. To use it, you'll need an executable called bjam.

bjam --build-dir=build-directory \
     --toolset=toolset-name stage

C:WINDOWS> cd C:\Program`` \ ``Files\boost\boost_1_34_0
C:\Program`` \ ``Files\boost\boost_1_34_0> bjam \
  --build-dir=%TEMP%\build-boost          \
  --toolset=msvc stage

$ cd ~/boost_1_34_0
$ bjam --build-dir=~/build-boost --prefix=~/boost

bjam --help

6.4   Expected Build Output

During the process of building Boost libraries, you can expect to see some messages printed on the console. These may include

• Notices about Boost library configuration—for example, the Regex library outputs a message about ICU when built without Unicode support, and the Python library may be skipped without error (but with a notice) if you don't have Python installed.

• Messages from the build tool that report the number of targets that were built or skipped. Don't be surprised if those numbers don't make any sense to you; there are many targets per library.

• Build action messages describing what the tool is doing, which look something like:

  toolset-name.c++ long/path/to/file/being/built
  

• Compiler warnings.

6.5   In Case of Build Errors

The only error messages you see when building Boost—if any—should be related to the IOStreams library's support of zip and bzip2 formats as described here. Install the relevant development packages for libz and libbz2 if you need those features. Other errors when building Boost libraries are cause for concern.

If it seems like the build system can't find your compiler and/or linker, consider setting up a user-config.jam file as described in the Boost.Build documentation. If that isn't your problem or the user-config.jam file doesn't work for you, please address questions about configuring Boost for your compiler to the Boost.Build mailing list.

7.1   Link to a Boost Library on Windows

Most Windows compilers and linkers have so-called “auto-linking support,” which eliminates the second challenge. Special code in Boost header files detects your compiler options and uses that information to encode the name of the correct library into your object files; the linker selects the library with that name from the directories you've told it to search.

cl /EHsc /I path\to\boost_1_34_0 example.cpp   \
     /link /LIBPATH: C:\Program Files\boost\boost_1_34_0\lib

7.2   Link to a Boost Library On *nix

There are two main ways to link to libraries:

1. You can specify the full path to each library:

   $ c++ -I /path/to/boost_1_34_0 example.cpp -o example \
      ~/boost/lib/libboost_regex-gcc-3.4-mt-d-1_34.a
   

2. You can separately specify a directory to search (with -Ldirectory) and a library name to search for (with -llibrary, [6] dropping the filename's leading lib and trailing suffix (.a in this case):

   $ c++ -I /path/to/boost_1_34_0 example.cpp -o example \
      -L~/boost/lib/ -lboost_regex-gcc-3.4-mt-d-1_34
   

   As you can see, this method is just as terse as method A for one library; it really pays off when you're using multiple libraries from the same directory. Note, however, that if you use this method with a library that has both static (.a) and dynamic (.so) builds, the system may choose one automatically for you unless you pass a special option such as -static on the command line.

In both cases above, the bold text is what you'd add to the command lines we explored earlier.

7.3   Library Naming

When auto-linking is not available, you need to know how Boost binaries are named so you can choose the right one for your build configuration. Each library filename is composed of a common sequence of elements that describe how it was built. For example, libboost_regex-vc71-mt-d-1_34.lib can be broken down into the following elements:

lib

Prefix: except on Microsoft Windows, every Boost library name begins with this string. On Windows, only ordinary static libraries use the lib prefix; import libraries and DLLs do not. [7]

boost_regex

Library name: all boost library filenames begin with boost_.

-vc71

Toolset tag: identifies the toolset and version used to build the binary.

-mt

Threading tag: indicates that the library was built with multithreading support enabled. Libraries built without multithreading support can be identified by the absence of -mt.

-d

ABI tag: encodes details that affect the library's interoperability with other compiled code. For each such feature, a single letter is added to the tag:

Key	Use this library when:
s	linking statically to the C++ standard library and compiler runtime support libraries.
g	using debug versions of the standard and runtime support libraries.
y	using a special debug build of Python.
d	building a debug version of your code. [8]
p	using the STLPort standard library rather than the default one supplied with your compiler.
n	using STLPort's deprecated “native iostreams” feature. [9]

For example, if you build a debug version of your code for use with debug versions of the static runtime library and the STLPort standard library in “native iostreams” mode, the tag would be: -sgdpn. If none of the above apply, the ABI tag is ommitted.

-1_34

Version tag: the full Boost release number, with periods replaced by underscores. For example, version 1.31.1 would be tagged as "-1_31_1".

.lib

Extension: determined according to the operating system's usual convention. On most *nix platforms the extensions are .a and .so for static libraries (archives) and shared libraries, respectively. On Windows, .dll indicates a shared library and—except for static libraries built by gcc toolset, whose names always end in .a— .lib indicates a static or import library. Where supported by *nix toolsets, a full version extension is added (e.g. ".so.1.34") and a symbolic link to the library file, named without the trailing version number, will also be created.

7.4   Test Your Program

To test our subject extraction, we'll filter the following text file. Copy it out of your browser and save it as jayne.txt:

To: George Shmidlap
From: Rita Marlowe
Subject: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
---
See subject.

path\to\compiled\example < path\to\jayne.txt

$ VARIABLE_NAME=path/to/lib/directory:${VARIABLE_NAME}
$ export VARIABLE_NAME

$ setenv VARIABLE_NAME path/to/lib/directory:${VARIABLE_NAME}

$ path/to/compiled/example < path/to/jayne.txt