STD:
ecflow used may part of std library. Originally ecflow used boost::shared_ptr, however for ecflow 5, this was replaced with the equivalent std::shared_ptr.
This was also required because of Cereal.
Std::auto_ptr has been replaced with std::unique_ptr
CEREAL
Is used to provide the client/server serialisations, it uses JSON text. There was an option to use BINARY which is a lot faster. But then we lose the backward compatibility, and more importantly the client/server communication may break due to byte order incompatibility.
It highly advisable to subscribe to the CEREAL mailing lists. This allows notifications of upcoming release of CEREAL, any performance improvements. It should be noted that we have already migrated to new version, at least once.
Currently the latest intel compiler breaks with CEREAL.