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## Chapter 13. Boost.Intrusive

### Olaf Krzikalla

### Ion Gaztanaga

Copyright © 2005 Olaf Krzikalla

Copyright © 2006-2011 Ion Gaztanaga

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

## Introduction

### Presenting Boost.Intrusive

Boost.Intrusive is a library presenting some intrusive containers to the world of C++. Intrusive containers are special containers that offer better performance and exception safety guarantees than non-intrusive containers (like STL containers).

The performance benefits of intrusive containers makes them ideal as a building block to efficiently construct complex containers like multi-index containers or to design high performance code like memory allocation algorithms.

While intrusive containers were and are widely used in C, they became more and more forgotten in C++ due to the presence of the standard containers which don't support intrusive techniques.Boost.Intrusive not only reintroduces this technique to C++, but also encapsulates the implementation in STL-like interfaces. Hence anyone familiar with standard containers can easily use Boost.Intrusive.

### Building Boost.Intrusive

There is no need to compile anything to use Boost.Intrusive, since it's a header only library. Just include your Boost header directory in your compiler include path.

Last revised: February 20, 2012 at 20:50:14 GMT |