Re: [boost] [serialization] fast array serialization (10x speedup)

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-15 13:20:59

Oh, and congratulations for restraining the otherwise natural Impulse to 
respond with some nasty remark.

Anyway, I'm hoping with a little bit of time the issues will Become clearer 
all around. Sometimes I think that time is all that Is required and there is 
no short cut. I do believe your Idea has merit in certain cases. I am 
skeptical of its applicability to portable binary archives. As I've said 
many times - for me, its OK to agree to disagree. I've taken great pains to 
factor the library in small enough pieces with the hope of permitting ideas 
such as yours to be added on (or removed) in a convenient way. And this 
benefits you as well. Now you don't have to sell your idea the majority. If 
some doesn't like it, you can just say - ok don't use it. All you need is a 
couple of people to share your point of view to make it acceptable.

Note that much of the success of the library is due to this Aspect of its 
design. Some people want XML, others want Binary, etc, etc. The way things 
are structured, those That don't want XML don't even see it in their code. 
Can You imagine what things would be like if I had to get Everyone to agree? 
As it is I'm pretty overwhelmed.

Anyway, thanks for your interest in extending the library.

I'm sorry its been a rougher and more painful road than it first appeared. 
Take my word for it - it'll get worse before it gets better. But you may 
well end up with something much better than you expected.

And BTW, I think that making a portable binary archive (including XDR, CDR, 
etc variants) is MUCH harder than it first appears. And that's even BEFORE 
one thinks of adding in a bitwise collection optimization. So that's why I 
left portable_?archive as an example. Some people have corrected its 
handling of endian-ness for some compilers so I guess someone is using it 
though I have no idea whom. Also ralf-k (I forget his whole name) make a 
very nice suggestion about how to do floating point numbers in a portable 
binary way.

I don't know if any of the above is interesting to you - but there it is.

Robert Ramey

Matthias Troyer wrote:

> Thanks Robert. I appreciate it and also want to apologize if I
> sounded too harsh. I value the effort you put into the serialization
> library and just want to make it usable for high-performance
> applications as well.
>
> Matthias
>
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