Re: [boost] Re:Serialization and Reflection

From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-12-18 02:19:55

On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 02:24 AM, Robert Ramey wrote:

> From: Matthias Troyer <troyer_at_[hidden]>
>
>> 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.
>
> is it possible to snag the xdr source code from FreeBSD unix so it can
> be compiled for windows?  I believe that the license would be boost 
> friendly
> I would love to include an xdr portable binary implementation but I 
> think that
> its appeal would be much diminished if itcouldn't be used by windows.
> After all, its whole motivation would be is archive portability.

I can look into that.
>
> I believe that this addition would make it portable to all platforms
> in common usage today (including Apple - based on freeBSD?).

It already works on Apple's Mac OS X.
>

>> I think we have one more disadvantage:
>> e) will not be able to deal with polymorphic objects, since there are
>> no virtual template functions
>
> the virtual functions eliminated would be those currently in *archive.
> user classes would be the same.  Bascially instead of inheriting from
> basic_[i|o] archives would be specialization of something like
>
>
> class biarchive
> {
> 	biarchive & operator <<(int i)
> 	...
> }
>
> then save/load would look like
>
> template<class Archive>
> void save(Archive &ar, T& t)
> {
> 	ar << member1;
> 	...
> }
>

Here we have a problem as far as I can see: if the class is 
polymorphic, how can I serialize the derived class by calling the 
save() function of the base class?

Matthias