Re: [boost] Serialization Library Review

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-17 11:59:38

From: "Beman Dawes" <bdawes_at_[hidden]>
> At 04:08 AM 11/17/2002, Matthias Troyer wrote:
>  >
>  >On Sunday, November 17, 2002, at 05:43 AM, David Abrahams wrote:
>  >>
>  >> Does anybody else feel they need more time to give this library a
>  >> thorough going-over? I think we could afford to extend the review for
>  >> a few more days. I would especially be willing to do so if it would
>  >> allow for enough discussion for someone like Jeff to make a definitive
>  >> vote, since he has experience in the domain.
>  >
>  >Yes, it would also help me to try get the code working under gcc v. 3
>  >and to really test the library, as well as to try provide some extra
>  >binary formats (e.g. XDR or PVM formats) in order to see if it works
>  >well.
>  >
>  >Could we extend it by one week so that we have another weekend?
>
> I'm really interested in the XDR format, not because I care about the
> format itself, but because others seem to use it as some sort of litmus
> test for serialization libraries. Thus knowing that Robert's library
> handles XDR well is of interest.

FWIW, in my experience, XML is a better test for whether a serialization
library handles custom formats well. Sequence-based, header-only formats are
very similar, but a reasonable XML serializer creates a tree-like
representation, with nested tags.