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

From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-03-01 17:28:20

On Friday, March 1, 2002, at 11:14  PM, rameysb wrote:
> b) using text is ZERO effort - using XDR or some other scheme
> requires significant programmer effort.

only once a couple of hours for one library writer

> c) I doubt that any such scheme is more robust than using the
> functions from the standard library.

we've used it for 8 years in production codes, for thousands of years
of CPU time on many machines, no problems.

> e) Archive size.  XDR fills out 32 bit integers to 4 bytes.  In text
> mode any integers less the 100 take only 3 bytes.  I don't know if
> XDR handles 64 bit integers but if it does presumable it fills out 8
> bytes per integer.  I would expect that text files are large in
> general but by how much would depend on the particular data.

for our typical 7-8 digit integers it's a factor of two

> So here is my summary. Rankings from most to least desirable are:
>
> portability - text, portable_binary, native
> programming effort - text, native, portable_binary
> archive size - native, portable_binary, text - application dependant
> execution speed - native, text/portable_binary (depends on
> implementation)
>
> As no option is ranked first in every catagory, and different
> applications have different priorities - there is no way that there
> can be universal agreement on this point.

agreed

> I am currently making changes that will implement iarchive and
> oarchive as base classes.  while the specific types will be handled
> through virtual functions.

that's what we use at the moment too.

> This wll permit any application to use his preferred format with no
> conflict.
>
> I hope this will adddress the issue

I agree and look forward to the new version,

Matthias