PartII.Containers and Data Structures

This part of the book covers the libraries Boost.Any, Boost.Variant, and Boost.Tuple. They are all containers in some sense, although they have virtually nothing in common with the Standard Library container types. These are all extremely useful libraries, which many others and I use to solve programming problems most every day. The problems they solve are not really covered by either C++ or the C++ Standard Library, and they are thus very important additions to our library toolbox. It's interesting to ponder how much the availability of basic data structures affect how we program, and even how we design. Without existing structures, we craft our own, and typically do so with significant consideration for the solution domain, which limits the reusability of our work. That's a common theme for all types of programming, of course, and the tradeoff is between genericity and basically just getting the job done. The value of flexible libraries that addresses both the issues we have at hand, and most issues we are likely to encounter at a later time, is substantial. These libraries also extend our C++ vocabulary in some sense, and the more users the libraries have, the larger the community that speaks these words. I am convinced that each of the libraries in this chapter deserves a place in every C++ professional's toolbox.