Re: [boost] Serialization Library: review

From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-20 09:14:57

On Wednesday, November 20, 2002, at 01:42 PM, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:

> [Issue 3] Library seems to hardcode important part of functionality 
> that
> users may want to overwrite. Here I refer in most part to 
> archive/object
> preamble.

> Major [Issue 3]: Submitted library is somewhat limited in a means to 
> modify
> what is written in archive header (I can change it but I will need to 
> supply
> full fledged specific archive cause currently this logic is in 
> constructor).
> And even more limited in a means to modify object header together with 
> logic
> bound to it. Let me give couple examples.
>
> 1. Serialization signature is 22 bytes. Let say I am serializing 
> messages
> into binary format for sending them through network. Size of my 
> serialized
> code is 10 bytes. I do not believe I could accept 22 bytes of 
> "signature
> information". The same about the version. I may or may not be 
> interested in
> versioning of serialization system.
> 2. Binary archive constructor save some "guard" information. I may or 
> may
> not want to do this. Or I may want to be even more careful.
> 3. Object save/load function contains pretty expensive logic for 
> making sure
> that object is stored/loaded only once. If for any reason 
> (performance) I
> could not afford constant searching but have external knowledge that 
> all
> objects are different I may want to skip lookup phase.
> 4. Let say I am sending data by contract.  It could be fixed contract 
> in
> external file loaded during initialization or dynamic one sent before
> sending real data. The purpose id to save the bandwidth and eliminate 
> all
> object/class ids from serialized stream. What should I do?

After playing some more and trying to read my old "legacy" 
serialization files which do not contain any such preamble I want to 
support Gennadiy's point. I would like for my archive classes (e.g. to 
read legacy archive formats) to override these preambles.

Matthias