Re: sockets library

From: mfdylan (dylan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-12-20 16:15:03

--- In boost_at_y..., "bill_kempf" <williamkempf_at_h...> wrote:
> I also find it vexing that there's no support 
> for binary output.  I think a binary_stream heirarchy would be a 
> wonderful thing for Boost to address as well (however, it should be 
> designed on it's own, not "hacked" in because Boost.Sockets or some 
> other library needed it... this is too important to design with 
such 
> a narrow view).  

The binary_stream class I wrote (a fairly quick&dirty conversion from 
some existing code we use commercially) is not really "hacked", it's 
based around the XDR protocol used for RPC, but does have some 
limitations that would be hard to avoid in any binary protocol.  
Basically I can't see something like this getting into the standard 
simply because it would be too hard to implement efficiently on 
certain platforms (eg non IEEE floating point platforms,.or those 
with weird byte orders or bitcounts), and the restrictions on int 
sizes etc might be considered anathema to the C/C++ 'generic int' 
philosophy.  Once the int<nn>_t types are standard in C++ it might be 
feasible, although it would be a pain that you couldn't work directly 
with longs/ints/chars etc.
Then again thinking about it, the same is true for ascii I/O - you 
can't write out an int on a 32-bit platform to an ascii stream and be 
guaranteed to be able to read it into an int on a 16-bit 
platform...so maybe the difference is not so fundamental.

Dylan