Boost C++ Library

Boost provides free, peer-reviewed and portable C++ source libraries.

Usage

To activate the library run one of the following:

module load Boost/1.72.0-gompi-2020a
module load Boost/1.74.0-GCC-10.2.0
module load Boost/1.74.0-iccifort-2020.4.304
module load Boost/1.79.0-GCC-11.2.0

Note that this also activates a particular version of the GCC compiler (as Boost depends on the C++ standard library, which is provided by the compiler). You must use this version of the compiler to build your code if you want to use this build of the Boost library. If you want to use a different compiler / compiler version then you need to request that a new build of Boost be compiled or compile a new build yourself.

Boost has been built without Python support: use conda and install the boost conda package if you want to use Boost with Python.

Build a simple program using Boost

Many Boost libraries are header-only which makes them particularly simple to compile. The following program reads a sequence of integers from standard input, uses Boost.Lambda to multiply each number by three, and writes them to standard output (taken from http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_64_0/more/getting_started/unix-variants.html):

#include <boost/lambda/lambda.hpp>
#include <iostream>
#include <iterator>
#include <algorithm>

int main()
{
    using namespace boost::lambda;
    typedef std::istream_iterator<int> in;

    std::for_each(
        in(std::cin), in(), std::cout << (_1 * 3) << " " );
}

Copy this into a file called example1.cpp and compile with:

g++ example1.cpp -o example

Provided you loaded the correct modules given above, the program should compile without error.

Linking to a Boost library

The following program is taken from the official Boost documentation http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_64_0/more/getting_started/unix-variants.html

#include <boost/regex.hpp>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

int main()
{
    std::string line;
    boost::regex pat( "^Subject: (Re: |Aw: )*(.*)" );

    while (std::cin)
    {
        std::getline(std::cin, line);
        boost::smatch matches;
        if (boost::regex_match(line, matches, pat))
            std::cout << matches[2] << std::endl;
    }
}

This program makes use of the Boost.Regex library, which has a separately-compiled binary component we need to link to. Assuming that the above program is called example2.cpp, compile with the following command:

g++ example2.cpp -o example2 -lboost_regex

Installation Notes

This section is primarily for administrators of the system. Boost has been installed using the default Easybuild config files.

Build logs and test reports can be found in $EBROOTBOOST/easybuild with a given module loaded.

Tested by compiling and running the two programs shown above.