Question

I’m new to C++. I just downloaded the Boost libraries to study. I wanted to look into some implementation details, so I looked for .cpp files. To my surprise, I haven’t found any so far.

There seem only .hpp files out there. Where are the .cpp files?

Answer 1

The .hpp files are the headers that you must include in your code in order to use Boost classes. Many Boost libraries are header-only; all of the implementations are in the .hpp files. For those that do have source, you only see the compiled versions as .lib files.

If you download a source distribution of Boost, it should have several subdirectories:

• boost: contains .hpp headers
• lib: contains .lib files (compiled implementation details)
• libs: the source of those implementation details