std::min and std::max versus Visual Studio

Recently, months back I wrote a wicked-cool solution using boost to encode binary data as base64. Sadly, it would not compile, b/c Microsoft did something evil in Windows.h when they defined min() and max(). I'd seen this problem and coded around it before. So I modified the boost code that broke:

C:\dev\sdk\boost_1_32_0\boost\archive\iterators>svn diff
Index: transform_width.hpp
===================================================================
--- transform_width.hpp (revision 201)
+++ transform_width.hpp (working copy)
@@ -142,7 +142,7 @@
}
else
bcount = BitsIn - m_displacement;
- unsigned int i = std::min(bcount, missing_bits);
+ unsigned int i = min(bcount, missing_bits);
// shift interesting bits to least significant position
unsigned int j = m_buffer >> (bcount - i);


But was this the most righteous solution?

Just last week I had to code away from a righteous std::numeric_limits::max() to the less righteous INT_MAX for the exact same reason. Today, this problem recurred. I had a choice between committing my change to boost, or powering through the problem. "OK, Microsoft, you've exceeded your kluge allocation."

The real problem isn't in boost, but in Visual Studio. This sent me googling to this link that said:

The Standard Library defines the two template functions std::min() and std::max() in the header. In general, you should use these template functions for calculating the min and max values of a pair. Unfortunately, Visual C++ does not define these function templates. This is because the names min and max clash with the traditional min and max macros defined in . As a workaround, Visual C++ defines two alternative templates with identical functionality called _cpp_min() and _cpp_max(). You can use them instead of std::min() and std::max().To disable the generation of the min and max macros in Visual C++, #define NOMINMAX before #including .

Therefore, I REVERTED my change to transform_width.hpp. Since I do not #include it doesn't matter where I #define NOMINMAX, so I put it in my project file's manifest of #defines.

It works and I feel more righteous.