Re: [boost] Re:Serialization and Reflection

From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-12-17 15:51:53

On Tuesday, December 17, 2002, at 05:52 PM, Robert Ramey wrote:
>
>> Second, in terms of Serialization, I'm willing to create a portable,
>> efficient binary archiver based on CDR (the format used by CORBA). 
>> Since
>> I'm lazy, I will probably steal most of the code from ACE/TAO
>> (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html). Note that CDR has minimal
>> overhead (eg: it has variable byte-ordering, so byte swapping may not 
>> be
>> necessary). If there's interest, let me know.
>
> There was much interest in implementing XDR.   I believe that initially
> it proceeded rapidly but bogged down because it depended on the
> existence of some code shipped only with unix.  Ultimately, 
> implemenation
> of a portable binary stream, requires specific coding for each machine
> architecture.  This makes the task larger than it first appears.

I would like to make a comment here: our aim was just to achieve 
portability between all different UNIX variants. We have about ten 
different UNIX architectures around, but actually no Windows machines. 
Thus, for our purposes XDR provides a perfect and portable binary 
format which we have ben using without problems for more than eight 
years.

Matthias