[boost] Re: Requests for changes in 1.33 related to serialization

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-05-16 10:11:29

Neal Becker wrote:
> I want to suggest 2 changes that would be helpful at least to me, that
> relate to serialization.
>
> I use serialization with mersenne_twister and python.  To support
> this 2 changes are needed:
>
> 1) serialization must be build as a shared library.  I know this
> doesn't
> work on all platforms, but I believe it works on at least some, and
> therefore should be supported.

Done in 1.33

> 2) Please add support for serialization to mersenne_twister.hpp.  All
> that's needed is this:
>
>  template<class Archive>
>   void serialize(Archive & ar, const unsigned int version)
>   {
>     ar & x;
>     ar & i;
>   }

Hmm - well, if this doesn't make it into boost, I presume its not a obstacle
for you.

This raises a question that comes up from time to time.  Where should code
for serialization of other types be placed? An who should be responible for
it?

I would hope that individual library authors would take on the task of
implementing serialization for the data types that they support.  This has
worked well with data-time, multi-index, and others.  It hasn't worked for
variant or shared_ptr.

Next question is where should serializaton stuff be kept.  Right now the
ones I've done - e.g. shared_ptr are kept in boost/serialization/....  I
believe others are kept in other places.  I would like to see more
consistency on this but really no consensus has been reached.  It does seem
that slow progress is being made here.

So I would like to see you or someone else take this code, make tests for it
and add it somewhere so it gets tested on all the compilers - which in the
past has turned out to be a bigger task than one would expect (though I
doubt that would be the case here).

There are a few other data types that to me are natural candidates for
serialziation, Quaternions, boost::any are ones I would like to see.

Robert Ramey