When should I use serialization library in boost?

Is Boost evil or not? In the context of performance, readability, maintaince, etc.

• There are some guys who believe Boost is the *source of evil*, *start of crappy program*. However, that library is being developed and maintained by a lot of people in the C++ standard committee. So, should I use it or not? For example, my own warpper of pthread v.s. boost::thread, and when dealing with sockets.

• Answer:

  Virtually everyone who thinks free code is evil just doesn't understand it. Most who say this just want to force people to use their awful implementations of the same thing, so they have a reason for existence. Boost is a collection of libraries. Most are very good, some are crap. I use boost.python, interprocess, diagnostic, operators, and a few others regularly. The ones that have become standardized I prefer to use the std:: version, like tuple, shared_ptr, thread, type_traits, etc.