I don't understand how it's not a general trend but it's also not a new thing. Saying it's not a general trend is the particular point I disagreed with. It's a

I don't understand how it's not a general trend but it's also not a new thing. Saying it's not a general trend is the particular point I disagreed with. It's a general problem in the C++ world, especially with the "modern" stuff, and it's either as bad or worse than before. Some people say boost isn't "modern", because it has accumulated a lot of historical cruft to support buggy compilers (old versions and varied vendors). I don't think that's the most accurate interpretation. I think "Modern C++" became such a big thing after C++11 because the effort required to make and use boost style libraries dropped significantly -- no longer do you need your project to either depend on boost, or implement its own version of some NONCOPYABLE macro to disable copy/assignment(/move) operators, or what have you. I think saying "modern" means removing the hassle along the way to implementing boost, is to miss that the point is to be able implement things like boost -- implementing/using things like boost is what's "modern". The fact that an absolute ton of the new standard library features have an origin story in boost only further confirms this. One thing I forgot to mention when I distracted myself with modules, is that I totally agree with the author that the problem is also about debug build runtime performance, not just compile time. Interesting to hear about modules. I'm out of the C++ game but I'd be happy for it to be working well.