The Boost Virus

Why is everyone so fucking inclined to use Boost?
Why do you need to add a fuck ton of dependencies on your small toy programs?

Can't you just stick with vanilla C++ and do us all a favor?

If there's anything I'm never installing for a project? It's boost.

Boost is just a natural, cancerous extension of the tentacle monster called STL.

C++ gives rise to powerful abstractions, which come at a high cost - as Linus called it, "spooky action at a distance". This is why a lot of people have agreed to treat it all as a black box, to even keep track of it all. Custom standard libraries are impossible for readable code, as potential audience would have to learn everything that happens underneath from scratch.

Note that OO itself isn't the devil, it's the sheer complexity of low level C++ you're forced to use with C++ OO.

This prompts contrarians to NIH their shit. To stop that, STL and Boost were invented. Have you ever worked with STL/Boost "free" codebase? Those tend to have NIH stdlibs just straight broken and ill conceived. Of course STL has its plan9 unicorns too ("better, but the predecessor is good enough so we use that") - for example QT, or even WTF.

Third route is to just treat C++ as C with classes and ignore most of its problematic features (references, scoped destructors, templating, operator overloading...) so that rules stay basically the same as with C - code can be read more or less intuitively, top down, procedural fashion, with minimum of hidden side effects. Then C++ becomes a convenient syntactic sugar.

If you want less broken OO language for system programming, just use something designed with that in mind. Go, Rust...