Ask HN : Experience with C++ Boost and Spirit?

[codedivine]

I am starting a project where I need to write a small parser in C++ and was looking at various options and one of the options that came up was Spirit C++ library which allows you to specify EBNF grammars inline. However I have heard horror stories about Boost in general and am worried about adding it as a dependency in the project.

Does anyone have experience with Spirit or Boost in general? The project is expected to be crossplatform targeting Vista32, Vista64 with VS2005 and VS2008 and Linux64 with GCC 4.3

[shutter]

I once used Spirit successfully, even though at the time I was not as well-versed in C++ as I should have been. I tend to like boost, because it makes a lot of things easy that would otherwise be difficult and/or time-consuming to write in C++.

[codedivine → shutter]

Thanks.

Do you remember if Spirit increased compile times significantly (a usual complaint with Boost?)? Also what architectures/compilers were you using?