Re: [boost] [serialization] use of unsigned int instead of size_type

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-02-10 11:39:34

David Abrahams wrote:
> Matthias Troyer <troyer_at_[hidden]> writes:
>
>>> It's still not clear what this should be changed to - if in fact it
>>> should be changed at all.  std::size_t is a candidate - but I was
>>> under the impression that there might be interest in defining a
>>> special type for this - like collection_size_t or ?
>>
>> Indeed that's what's needed, and I have all the patches ready that
>> would need to be applied to do it.
>
> Please, guys, get this into 1.34.  It's embarassing and a little
> frustrating that this problem has persisted so long.

It turns out that the internal library version number is going to be
bumped from 3 to 4 in the next release.  This has been necessary
to implement a correction to versioning of items of collections. So
its not a bad time to make such a change if that is indeed what
is necessary.

My question is - what is the urgency.  The current system would
inhibit the serialization of collections of greater than 2 G objects.
But as far as I know no one has yet run into that problem.  So
I'm curious - has the usage of 32 bit count of objects created
some problem somewhere else?

Robert Ramey