Boost C++ Libraries Home Libraries People FAQ More

PrevUpHomeNext

Introduction

Building Boost.Interprocess
Tested compilers

Boost.Interprocess simplifies the use of common interprocess communication and synchronization mechanisms and offers a wide range of them:

Boost.Interprocess also offers higher-level interprocess mechanisms to allocate dynamically portions of a shared memory or a memory mapped file (in general, to allocate portions of a fixed size memory segment). Using these mechanisms, Boost.Interprocess offers useful tools to construct C++ objects, including STL-like containers, in shared memory and memory mapped files:

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

Boost.Interprocess depends on Boost.DateTime, which needs separate compilation. However, the subset used by Boost.Interprocess does not need any separate compilation so the user can define BOOST_DATE_TIME_NO_LIB to avoid Boost from trying to automatically link the Boost.DateTime.

In POSIX systems, Boost.Interprocess uses pthread system calls to implement classes like mutexes, condition variables, etc... In some operating systems, these POSIX calls are implemented in separate libraries that are not automatically linked by the compiler. For example, in some Linux systems POSIX pthread functions are implemented in librt.a library, so you might need to add that library when linking an executable or shared library that uses Boost.Interprocess. If you obtain linking errors related to those pthread functions, please revise your system's documentation to know which library implements them.

Boost.Interprocess has been tested in the following compilers/platforms:

  • Visual >= 7.1
  • GCC >= 4.1
  • Intel 11

PrevUpHomeNext