Re: [boost] Re: Serialization library - submission #5 and request for formal review

From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-09-10 12:53:52

On Tuesday, Sep 10, 2002, at 03:33 US/Pacific, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Robert Ramey wrote:
>> Fellow boosters,
>> I am loading my final offering for serialization.zip and requestion a 
>> formal review.
>> This version differes from the previous one in the following:
>> 1) Additions to documentation to explicitly address issues of 
>> exception safety.
>> 2) More test cases/demos to illustrate handlling of the above issues.
>> 3) Additions to documentation to include rationale for not depending 
>> on type_id
>
> I'm afraid I'm not convinced by either the rationale or your posts. 
> For that reason plan to argue and vote against the inclusion of your 
> library in the current state.
>
> In addition, there was *no* real discussion on interface. I still 
> would like to use 'describe', which may work in 95% of cases. I also 
> have some other minor disagreements. I'm afraid we won't be able to 
> come to a decision over formal review period.
>
> Given that a lot of time still remains, would you be willings to 
> actively discuss those issues. I really would like to have 
> serialization in Boost, only don't feel that the library reached the 
> level that I'd like.

Robert, I appreciate all your efforts in writing this library.
However, while different formats are now supported, I mentioned
some time ago that a specialization for writing C-style arrays of
the basic data types is important for good performance. When
(de)serializing a matrix of 100'000'000 doubles I do not want to
call (in the worst case) a virtual function  100'000'00 times.
And note, I still want to serialize these numbers in a portable
format and not just write the machine-dependent binary representation.

I would thus also prefer some more discussions before a formal review.

Best regards,

Matthias