Re: [boost] [Boost Review] Property Tree Library

From: Marcin Kalicinski (kalita_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-20 09:14:44

> The major use I thought of is a scene graph. This typically consists of a
> large number of nodes ( Can be many Mb file) many containing structures of
> points and transforms. I suspect its cheaper to keep these in memory in 
> their
> binary format rather than as strings.

What you need to store a scene graph is a generic tree container, not ptree. 
Property tree is for storing properties. Anyway, if you want you can 
consider customizing data type to be some sort of Object *, but I don't know 
if this is going to take you very far.

> Whatever...  it would be interesting to see the rationale behind the 
> design
> decisions made within the documentation. I *think* that a trade off has 
> been
> made in favour of convenience and 'light weight' (I think it would not 
> perform
> well on large files for example)

Yes, being light-weight and easy to use it the main goal. I think this is 
said in the introduction part of the docs.

>>>Is it necessary to make key a string. Could it not also be (say) an 
>>>integer
>>>id?

Library would need some sort of path parsing policy. I think that the only 
required function would be to separate head of the path from the tail (sort 
of Lisp-like behaviour). This is quite an interesting proposition, I 
consider it the most valuable addition to the library at the moment.

Thank you,
Marcin