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

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-22 19:37:00

David Abrahams wrote:

>> Peter Dimov wrote:

>>> In the situations that I've needed it, the subset of types that
>>> could be written in a single operation could not be described by a
>>> type trait. A type trait can't tell you whether the in-memory
>>> representation and the on-disk representation of a type are the
>>> same.
>
> As soon as you talk about "on-disk" you're already limiting your
> thinking too much, since we're not necessarily serializing to disk,
> and the idea of having the "same representation" somewhere is somewhat
> limiting too.  An MPI archive builds up a skeletal representation of
> what needs to be serialized and then MPI reads it out of memory into
> the hardware.
>
> For example, MPI archives support array serialization for all PODs
> that are not pointers and do not contain pointer members.

I'm not sure I follow. How does an MPI archive serialize an array of X, 
where X is an arbitrary POD (without pointer members)?