I don't get your reasoning (mainly because all you've provided none). I wrote games, we used Boost heavily, on the PC, Xbox360, DS, Wii and PSP. I mean really heavily. Boost.Thread, Boost.SmartPtr, Boost.Bind, Boost.Function, Boost.MultiSet, Boost.Array, Boost.PreProcessor, Boost.LexicalCast... (more)...

We turned off exceptions (BOOST_NO_EXCEPTION) because the Wii and the DS didn't support exceptions. That was it. We never had a problem with spurious assertions, nor with unexpected behaviour from a lack of assertions. Compile times were about 5 to 7 minutes for partial builds. A full build was longer (I forget), something like 15. This is a huge code base, remember.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. It's certainly not a "general rule of thumb".

The fact that there are people who use boost heavily is not news to me. So if you're confused by my assertion that everybody avoids boost as a general rule, well, I'm confused as to why you believe I made such an assertion.

(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.)