Helpful libraries for C++

Question

Everyone should know about boost. What are other helpful libraries for C++? If you need to mention specifics (like libcurl, freeimage) please note what they are specific to (web protocol, image loading).

Answer 1

POCO C++ Librarie

Features

threads, thread synchronization and advanced abstractions for multithreaded programming streams and filesystem access shared libraries and class loading powerful logging and error reporting security and encryption network programming (TCP/IP sockets, HTTP client and HTTP server, FTP, SMTP, POP3, etc.) XML parsing (SAX2 and DOM) and generation configuration file and options handling SQL database access (ODBC, MySQL, SQLite)

Answer 2

SOCI, http://soci.sourceforge.net/

SOCI is a database access library for C++ that makes the illusion of embedding SQL queries in the regular C++ code, staying entirely within the Standard C++.

Example code:

string name;
int salary;
Person p;

sql << "select name, salary from persons where id = " << id,
       into(name), into(salary);

// Object relational mapping
sql << "select first_name, last_name, date_of_birth "
       "from persons where id = " << id,
       into(p);

// Integration with STL
Rowset<string> rs = (sql.prepare << "select name from persons");
copy(rs.begin(), rs.end(), ostream_iterator<string>(cout, "\n"));

Answer 3

expat

http://expat.sourceforge.net

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expat_(XML)

An awesome xml parser :)

Answer 4

Qt -- even if you're not using the GUI capabilities, it's wealth of classes (see here) is stunning.

Answer 5

For scientific/engineering applications: TNT

Answer 6

Crypto++ - encryption library

Ogre3D - 3D graphics

OIS - cross platform input

PixelToaster - 2D software rendering

Anti-Grain Geometry - High quality rendering engine

Answer 7

I use Loki-lib most of the time. It's a generic, policy based library with generic DPs, idioms and other useful code snippets.
Boost is also good.
Ace is very good for distrubuted programming.

Answer 8

CGAL - Computer Graphics Algorithms Library

Also see this introduction to CGAL from Google Tech Talks on YouTube.

Answer 9

Intels OpenCV for computer vision.

Answer 10

CxxTest for unit testing.

Answer 11

Available C++ libraries FAQ

Answer 12

IntelTBB for better multithreading. (More than just threads and mutexes)

Answer 13

SDL for multi-platform graphics.

Answer 14

STL for everyday C++ programming. It has useful algorithms, containers and data structures.