Re: [boost] Support for reading/writing binary 'streams' (asio?)

From: Cliff Green (cliffg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-03-29 11:29:17

>Sometimes it is necessary to send floats and doubles as well between
different hosts.

When dealing with floating points, there's all kinds of issues, including
(as already mentioned) IEEE754 or other formats. 

By the time you have a generalized "marshalling" scheme that handles
integers, floats, strings, etc, you've re-invented protocols such as XDR
(eXternal Data Representation - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Data_Representation). Maybe there
should be a Boost library for encoding and decoding to XDR? There's other
possibilities such as SDXF or CDR (used in Corba).

>It would be really nice if boost.asio or boost.whatever automagically
handled 
>such floating-point primitives in the most efficient yet portable manner.

Whatever is added to Boost for encoding / marshalling and decoding /
unmarshalling should be separate from libraries such as Asio - it can be
used by multiple libraries, any time objects / data needs to be transported
among multiple platforms / systems, whether through a network or file system
... And definitely there should hooks to Boost.Serialization.

Cliff