title: Alternative to boost::lexical_cast
body: <p>I'm taking a part in a challenge, and just to cut to the point, in one of places in my program I need to convert string to an integer. I've tried boost::lexical_cast but unfortunatelly it is sooo sloowwww. I suppose because all of the checks it performs. What I need is something that would perform this conversion without any checks (I know that there will be valid numbers stored as strings). By the way using stringstream in the naive way:   </p>
  
  <pre><code>stringstream interpreter;
  interpreter &lt;&lt; str;
  interpreter &gt;&gt; number;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>is even slower than boost::lexical_cast.<br>
  Is atoi the only alternative?</p>