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Portable networking and other low-level I/O, including sockets, timers, hostname resolution, socket iostreams, serial ports, file descriptors and Windows HANDLEs.
Types and conversion functions for correct byte ordering and more regardless of processor endianness.
The format library provides a class for formatting arguments according to a format-string, as does printf, but with two major differences: format sends the arguments to an internal stream, and so is entirely type-safe and naturally supports all user-defined types; the ellipsis (...) can not be used correctly in the strongly typed context of format, and thus the function call with arbitrary arguments is replaced by successive calls to an argument feeding operator%.
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.