Boost.Intrusive is a library presenting some intrusive containers to the world of C++. Intrusive containers are special containers that offer better performance and exception safety guarantees than non-intrusive containers (like STL containers).

The performance benefits of intrusive containers makes them ideal as a building block to efficiently construct complex containers like multi-index containers or to design high performance code like memory allocation algorithms.

While intrusive containers were and are widely used in C, they became more and more forgotten in C++ due to the presence of the standard containers which don't support intrusive techniques.Boost.Intrusive wants to push intrusive containers usage encapsulating the implementation in STL-like interfaces. Hence anyone familiar with standard containers can easily use Boost.Intrusive.

There is no need to compile anything to use Boost.Intrusive, since it's a header only library. Just include your Boost header directory in your compiler include path.