It took 69 single steps to get past a BOOST_FOREACH() statement. Madness. (twitter.com)
As he often does, John Carmack gives a brief and powerful argument. While I still have a love for C++, just because library developers can do something with enough preprocessor and templates, doesn't mean they should.
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Sure, it drags C++ by its angle bracket into a higher abstraction level, if you want that. But adding the core of Boost to any project is like a snake swallowing an elephant made of source files. Even worse, they're practically all template header files. This is not a virtue. I just can't see myself really wanting to make that tradeoff.
Installing/building it the 1st time can be a little messy (the same to be expected from any large library) but it pays off in the long run... Boost has all the stuff you wanted the standard library to have.