Q: I’ve been trying to install the Boost [http://www.boost.org] C++ Libraries for a while now, and I haven’t gotten it to work yet. I installed a Library using “make” the other day and it worked fine, but boost uses bjam to install itself. Also according to the Boost wiki “only a few libraries require a library compilation step using Boost.Jam. These are: thread, regex and python. Graph also requires this step only if the graphviz feature is to be used. The other Boost libraries are contained completely within header files.” I have no idea what that means, and if I don’t have to compile it where should I put it? The website is pretty vague about all of this and I was wondering if anyone could offer help?

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Can’t help with that, but apparently it doesn’t like installing on MacOSX due to a bug with gcc whereby files passed with -isystem are extern “C”‘ed… which breaks the templates in, e.g., Spirit. (Spirit gave me 1286 errors, most of which were “template with C linkage” or some such.) Apparently you have to pass -I (that’s a capital i, not an L or something like that) when including boost’s headers, and I for one don’t know how to do that with Xcode or my life would be a lot easier.

As it is, I’m using flex, and I’m not fond of it.

– RobRix

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For the portions of boost that are contained in the headers only. All you need to do for Xcode is add the boost directory to your Header Search Paths in your build settings to start using it. This would be the same as adding a -I/Users/someuser/somedir/boost-1.30.2/ for a gcc command line build.