If STL is the most common framework among C++ programs, Boost probably comes second. A real Swiss army knife! This toolkit contains a profusion of utilities to handle most common needs, and even more.

Most Boost features are provided as header-only code, which means that we do not need to compile it. Including headers is enough of an advantage to use it. This is the case of the most popular features of Boost: Smart Pointers, a reference-counting pointer class that handles memory allocation and de-allocation automatically. They avoid most memory leaks and pointer misuse for almost free.

However, a few parts of Boost require compilation first, such as the threading or the unit test library. We are now going to see how to build them with the Android NDK and compile a unit test executable.