Portable networking and other low-level I/O, including sockets, timers, hostname resolution, socket iostreams, serial ports, file descriptors and Windows HANDLEs.

Filling containers with constant or generated data has never been easier.

Types and conversion functions for correct byte ordering and more regardless of processor endianness.

The format library provides a type-safe mechanism for formatting arguments according to a printf-like format-string.

Utilities for the standard I/O library.

Boost.IOStreams provides a framework for defining streams, stream buffers and i/o filters.

The program_options library allows program developers to obtain program options, that is (name, value) pairs from the user, via conventional methods such as command line and config file.

Serialization for persistence and marshalling.