Re: [boost] Serialization Review Results

From: Miroslav Silovic (miro_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-12-13 06:06:15

Augustus Saunders wrote:

>You could pretty much write that same code now with iostreams
>replacing CArchive.  How is *any* serialization library going to make
>your life easier than it is now?  I don't want to sound accusatory,
>so let me rephrase: If you could have anything your serializing heart
>could desire (that you don't already have), what would it be?
>  
>
Something I would need from a serialization library:

    1. Versioning.  The system should know the version of the serialized 
objects. There should be some support for automated upgrading or at 
least stale archive detection (about upgrading, it'd help a lot if the 
stream contained schema for the classes, with property names and types. 
This schema (as well as the version numbers, class codes, etc) should be 
separable from the serialized objects themselves, so you can share it 
between multiple object dumps)

    2. Pointer graph traversal. If you have a bunch of objects pointing 
at each other, you want to turn pointer values into something that can 
consistently be reconstituted into the new pointer values (which may 
change). There should be a toggle on whether you want to automatically 
serialize the pointed objects or just store the encoded pointer.