How to get Boost libraries binaries that work with Visual Studio?

Question

Here's a question you may have seen around the 'nets in various forms...summed up here for you googling pleasure :-)

I have a project that is built with Microsoft's Visual Studio and uses functionality from boost (http://www.boost.org/). I already have my project working with some of the libraries that are header only (no binary library needed to link with). How or where can I get the windows binaries for the other libraries?

Answer 1

Build them yourself. Download a bjam executable from the boost website, then execute the following command from the boost src root directory:

bjam --toolset=msvc --build-type=complete define=_BIND_TO_CURRENT_MFC_VERSION=1 define=_BIND_TO_CURRENT_CRT_VERSION=1 stage

Then go get some coffee or leave it running over night. After that you get results in the 'stage' folder. Add this directory to your 'library files' in options->projects and solutions->VC++ directories.

Answer 2

There are three different options for accessing the binary libraries:

1) Build them from source.
Go into the boost directory and run:

    bootstrap
    .\bjam

Or get more complicate and do something like:

    bjam --stagedir="c:\Program Files\Boost" --build-type=complete --toolset=msvc-9.0 --with-regex --with-date_time --with-thread --with-signals --with-system --with-filesystem --with-program_options stage

2) Use the BoostPro installer (http://www.boostpro.com/download) to get the specific libraries that you need.
This is very nice because it only downloads and installs the files that you say you want. However, it never has the most current version available, and there are no 64 bit binaries.

3) Download the entire set of libraries (http://boost.teeks99.com)
Easy to use, simple to do, but the libraries are huge (7GB unzipped!).