History of the Boost Graph Library

Soon after the Standard Template Library was released, work began at the LSC to apply generic programming to scientific computing. The Matrix Template Library (Jeremy Siek's masters thesis) was one of the first projects. Many of the lessons learned during construction of the MTL were applied to the design and implementation of the GGCL.

Graph algorithms play an important role in sparse matrix computations, so the LSC had a need for a good graph library. However, none of the available graph libraries (LEDA, GTL, Stanford GraphBase) were written using the generic programming style of the STL, and hence did not fulfill the flexibility and high-performance requirements of the LSC. Others were also expressing interest in a generic C++ graph library. During a meeting with Bjarne Stroustrup we were introduced to several people at AT\&T who needed such a library. There had also been earlier work in the area of generic graph algorithms, including some codes written by Alexander Stepanov, and Dietmar Kühl's masters thesis.

With this in mind, and motivated by homework assignments in his algorithms class, Jeremy began prototyping an interface and some graph classes in the spring on 1998. Lie-Quan Lee then developed the first version of GGCL, which became his masters thesis project.

The following year, Jeremy went to work for SGI with Alexander Stepanov and Matt Austern. During this time Alex's disjoint-sets based connected components algorithm was added to GGCL, and Jeremy began working on the concept documentation for GGCL similar to Matt's STL documentation.

While working at SGI, Jeremy heard about Boost and was excited to find a group of people interested in creating high-quality C++ libraries. At boost there were several people interested in generic graph algorithms, most notably Dietmar Kühl. Some discussions about generic interfaces for graph structures resulted in the a revision of GGCL which closely resembles the current Boost Graph Library interface.

On September 4, 2000 GGCL passed the Boost formal review and became the Boost Graph Library (BGL). The first release of BGL was September 27, 2000.

Changes by version

• Version 1.33.1
  Bug Fixes
  • fruchterman_reingold_force_directed_layout: Fixed enumeration of grid-force pairs, which caused some odd graph formations along grid lines.
  • king_ordering and cuthill_mckee_ordering: Fixed bug that caused failures with the multi-component version of these algorithms.
• Version 1.33.0
  New algorithms and components
  • Experimental Python bindings, from Doug Gregor and Indiana University.
  • floyd_warshall_all_pairs_shortest_paths, from Lauren Foutz and Scott Hill.
  • astar_search, from Kristopher Beevers and Jufeng Peng.
  • fruchterman_reingold_force_directed_layout, from Doug Gregor and Indiana University.
  • biconnected_components and articulation_points, from Indiana University.
  • gursoy_atun_layout, from Jeremiah Willcock and Doug Gregor of Indiana University.
  • king_ordering, from D. Kevin McGrath of Indiana University.
  • erdos_renyi_iterator
  • plod_iterator
  • small_world_iterator
  
  Enhancements
  
  • bellman_ford_shortest_paths now permits one to specify the starting vertex, so that it will perform its own initialization.
  • undirected_dfs is now data-recursive, resulting in improved performance in some cases, from Synge Todo.
  • dijkstra_shortest_paths now uses a relaxed heap [61] as its priority queue, improving its complexity to O(V log V) and improving real-world performance for larger graphs.
  • read_graphviz now has a new, Spirit-based parser that works for all graph types and supports arbitrary properties on the graph, from Ron Garcia. The old, Bison-based GraphViz reader has been deprecated and will be removed in a future Boost release.
  • write_graphviz now supports output of dynamic properties (as read in through the new read_graphviz).
  • cuthill_mckee_ordering has been recast as an invocation of breadth_first_search and now supports graphs with multiple components.
  • subgraph now supports bundled properties. get_property now refers to the subgraph property, not the root graph's property.
  • filtered_graph now supports bundled properties.
  • reverse_graph now supports bundled properties, set_property, and get_property.
  
  Bug fixes
  
  • bellman_ford_shortest_paths now deals with unreachable vertices better.
  • adjacency_list: parallel edge removal with OutEdgeListS = listS has been fixed. Copying and swapping has been fixed.
  • Incremental connected components: fixed a bug in the incremental_components routine that may have caused incorrect results.
  • The remove_out_edge_if function for an undirected adjacency_list has been rewritten and should no longer dereference singular iterators.
  • write_graphviz now accepts a vertex_id parameter that is used to name the nodes.
  • read_graphviz now accepts empty attribute lists.
  • sequential_vertex_coloring has been updated, tested, and documented.