Libraries

Summary

This page describes the preferred libraries used with the Mantid code base.

General

• Use libraries from std where possible.

• Boost header-only libraries are also always available. The following compiled Boost libraries are available:

  • regex

  • date_time

  • python

  • serialization

  • others required must be discussed with the TSC

• Eigen is used for fast linear algebra calculations

• Poco is also used for:

  • asynchronous method support

  • application configuration

  • logging

  • path handling (will eventually be replaced by std::filesystem)

  • networking

  • XML parsing

Specific Recommendations

Regex

Prefer boost::regex over std::regex (bugs in std::regex until gcc 5 and some platforms still use gcc 4.8)

String Algorithms (chop, ends_with etc)

• For any string functions that are not implemented in the C++ standard, prefer Boost algorithms if possible

• Some string utilities also exist in MantidKernel/Strings.h