You have to be careful with what you pull in. But with precompiled headers I'm building a suite of 25 command line apps, all dependent on boost, in 22 seconds on a 2012 MacBook Air. gcc on Windows is similar.
Microsoft doesn't even let you share precompiled headers across projects, but it's still building in under 20 seconds.
There's a LOT of really idiotic C++ build scripts out there. I really don't know what some people are thinking.
Neither is the hardware. The point is that I'm doing a clean build of an entire app in under a second. Which means the "boost tax" is also under a second.
You can certainly make a mess of things if you're not careful. Most people seem to.
I'm using boost/any, boost/iostreams/stream & tee, and boost/property_tree/json_parser. So obviously I'm not going nuts with things. But wanted to provide the data point.
Microsoft doesn't even let you share precompiled headers across projects, but it's still building in under 20 seconds.
There's a LOT of really idiotic C++ build scripts out there. I really don't know what some people are thinking.