Re: [boost] Re: Serialization (Persistence) library draft submission

From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-27 17:01:39

On Wednesday, February 27, 2002, at 10:48  PM, rameysb wrote:
> input and output archives are not derived from streams.  They are
> implement in terms of strings.  This is addressed in the "Rational"
> section of the documentation.  The reference to the stream to be used
> is passed when the archive is created.  So all issues associated with
> streams are orthogonal to archives.
>
> also the rational for using text for numbers - is portability from
> machine to machine.  binary portability would be a huge hassle and
> never be complete.  Its bad enough that there are little and big
> endien machines, floating point formats vary from machine to
> machine.  I believe that the only practical way to make archives
> portable across machines to use text files.

If there's interest I could post our current serialization library
which allows more than text formats, and runtime polymorphism
on the data format. Not as a proposal for a library, but as an
example of what we need from a serialization library.

Matthias