Boost persistence library

From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-23 04:24:51

Dear Boosters,

In updating and rewriting my sources I got to the stage where
it would be preferably to use a "standard" persistence library
instead of my own custom one (which I've used for the past 7 years).

I have looked at Jens Maurer's efforts in the boost files section,
which unfortunately seems to be idling there and not developed further.
 From my experience I found three things that my own persistence
library supports but which I miss in Jens'   (otherwise much nicer) 
library.
I want to bring up these issues here:

i) I often have to (de)serialize large arrays of numbers, for which an
    optimized function should exist that can (de)serialize a C-array in
    one function call. This also allows support for data formats such as
    HDF

ii) (De)serialization of pointers

iii) using runtime polymorphism with the persistence library. At the 
moment
    only compile time polymorphism is implemented, and the Reader/Writer
    needs to be chosen at compile time. This is a problem in my 
applications,
    where the (de)serialization is controlled from an application 
framework,
    which calls a virtual save/load function of a simulation object. For 
this
    to work the save and load functions for the basic data types need to 
be
    virtual functions too.

While issues i) and ii) can easily be addressed in Jens' library 
prototype,
usage scenario in iii) (as far as I see) cannot be done in Jens' library 
since
virtual template functions are impossible.

Any ideas/comments how to proceed with the persistence library, which 
seems
to me a very important one?

Matthias