(Note that I don't completely avoid Boost either. The thing is, the parts that are nice to use are simple enough to reimplement more situation-appropriately, and the other parts, I'll use, but I'll use them with trepidation, and if I don't feel like thinking about whether they might be useful, avoid them. For example, it's better to write a recursive descent parser than it is to use Spirit, and it's better to write your own serialization stuff than to use Boost Serialization (if only for compile times, but also, there's some disturbing complexity hidden in that library). I don't exactly know how you use LexicalCast without exceptions turned on, but if you're going in the int->string direction I generally use a printf-like function that returns a std::string.)