Looking at the Numbers

Apr 14, 2025

We continue to make exciting progress developing new libraries for inclusion in Boost.

New Libraries

Decimal

Decimal (https://github.com/cppalliance/decimal) is a ground-up implementation of IEEE 754 Decimal Floating Point types in C++14, co-authored with Chris Kormanyos. In January we had our formal review for inclusion in Boost. Unfortunately, we were not accepted, but we were also not rejected. There were a lot of comments that we have addressed in the past few months, and many other optimization path we are pursuing. We will look at doing a mini-review later in the year once we talk with our review manager, and the Boost community on the updated state of the library. The library is certainly better now than it was in Janurary, and will continue to improve over the coming months. We welcome users to try the library and provide feedback before we pursue a second review. Discussions are ongoing in the Cpplang Slack channel #boost-decimal.

int128

Int128 (https://github.com/cppalliance/int128) is a small library that has more or less fallen out of work on Decimal. It provides two type: an unsigned 128-bit integer and a signed 128-bit integer. There are plenty of applications of 128-bit integers, but trying to make them portable is a pain. Since Decial uses 128-bit integers behind the scenes we decided to pull those parts out into their own library. We have optimizations for a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit platforms as we benchmark all commits extensivly. Look for this one to be announced shortly.

Crypt

I know there are a few people interested in this library. Unfortunately, due to the above two libraries we did not have as much time for Crypt as we would have liked. We did make some improvements to memory safety, and contiue to make architectural improvements. This library will continue to develop over the coming months. We think it will be worth the wait.

Existing Libraries

Random

By popular demand I added a number of PRNGs from the XOSHIRO Family (128, 256, and 512 bits) which shipped with Boost version 1.88. If you are unsure of which generator you need in your code this family of generators is a good starting point. Details and performance measurements can be found in the Boost.Random docs starting with Boost version 1.88.