Re: sockets library

From: mfdylan (dylan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-12-20 22:17:19

--- In boost_at_y..., "bill_kempf" <williamkempf_at_h...> wrote:
> 
> There's no evidence that a binary_stream need to be inefficient.  
In 
> fact the majority of overhead in iostreams comes from locales and 
> formatting facilities, both of which would not exist in a 
> binary_stream.  I'd be willing to bet that we could develop a 
> binary_stream that was as efficient as a lower level abstraction, 
and 
> there's a lot of power that comes from such a design.  For instance 
> it becomes quite easy to define inserters and extractors for 
> arbitrary types, allows for pluggable converters for native 
> representations, XDR representations, etc.
> 
That's an interesting idea, mine doesn't allow pluggable convertors.
Maybe a templated convertor would be more sensible?
How useful would a "native representation" be?

> Further, if the binary_stream uses an streambuf to wire the data 
then 
> you can easily create buffer types for anything that work with both 
> binary and formatted I/O.  A single socketbuf class would allow you 
> to use binary I/O (possibly with an XDR representation) in one 
> instance and formatted text I/O (which can be much easier to use 
for 
> some protocols) in another instance.
> 
Aha, that's exactly what mine does, all you need to use on the 
streambuf is sputn(), sgetn() and sync().

Dylan