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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

And if you use C++ and are willing to use Boost, program_options: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_47_0/doc/html/program_option...

I recognize that many people are not willing to use C++, and among those that are, many are still unwilling to use Boost, but I find the program_options library to be great. An example use that I think is reasonable and a big win over doing it myself: https://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L...

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> many are still* unwilling to use Boost*

I can appreciate the subtlety of wording, but in reality it is more of

> many will never be touching Boost even with a long pole and for a large sum of money

Yeah, I was thinking of the people who are violently opposed to it. And, man, I have to admit I really don't get that attitude. There are some well-designed libraries in there, and you can pick-and-choose which libraries you want to use.

I respect people's decision, I guess I just don't understand it.

When I have to compile your program which uses that oh-so-useful Boost library, I curse you to the skies.

I haven't used C++ since college so I don't understand why this would be an issue.

If you don't have an easy way of installing boost, it becomes complicated - just to compile one program.

That said, boost is a dependency that pays off in terms of programmer time if what you're doing is complicated enough (in other words, if you think you might reimplement some part of boost, you're better off using it as a dependency instead.)

Boost is installed standard with most Linux distributions now.

What's the deal with not liking Boost? I've used several of its components off and on over the years.

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