The rationale described there for pybind sums up my experiences with boost. Now that much of the best parts of boost are available in C++11, boost ends up being

The rationale described there for pybind sums up my experiences with boost. Now that much of the best parts of boost are available in C++11, boost ends up being more trouble than it is worth. In general, I think it is best avoided if you're writing software that you expect to still need supporting in a decade. And you can always borrow ideas from it - we have our own lexical_cast like template for example. I also find from past experience that seamless interoperability is not always a good thing because it obscures the interface boundaries. It can make it hard to replace one side of the interface and can lead to programmers not familiar with the full design of the software doing things inefficiently. I once worked on a huge project using Corba and it wasn't always easy to know which calls were remote.