Boost.Container is a product of a long development
effort that started in
2004 with the experimental Shmem library, which pioneered the use
of standard containers in shared memory. Shmem included modified SGI STL
container code tweaked to support non-raw
types and stateful allocators. Once reviewed, Shmem was accepted as Boost.Interprocess
and this library continued to refine and improve those containers.
In 2007, container code from node containers (
was rewritten, refactored and expanded to build the intrusive container library
Boost.Interprocess containers were refactored
to take advantage of Boost.Intrusive containers
and code duplication was minimized. Both libraries continued to gain support
and bug fixes for years. They introduced move semantics, emplacement insertion
and more features of then unreleased C++0x standard.
Boost.Interprocess containers were always
standard compliant, and those containers and new containers like
flat_[multi]set/map were used outside Boost.Interprocess
with success. As containers were mature enough to get their own library,
it was a natural step to collect them containers and build Boost.Container,
a library targeted to a wider audience.
With so many high quality standard library implementations out there, why would you want to use Boost.Container? There are several reasons for that: