Re: [boost] [integer] Promotion of endian library code from vault

From: Neil Mayhew (neil_mayhew_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-05-23 11:27:49

On 23/05/08 07:45 AM Giovanni Piero Deretta wrote:
>  On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 1:46 PM, dizzy <dizzy_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > ... protocol binary structures are never mapped directly in memory
> > (you can with some compiler extensions but you won't gain anything
> > since I/O is the bottleneck in such cases and not memory copy).
> > Instead a serialization aproach should solve such issues.
>
>  With disk I/O this is certainly true, on the other hand, high speed
>  LAN networks might actually be faster than (uncached) memory accesses
>  (think for example 10G ethernet). Zero copy I/O is certainly an
>  useful property.

Also, protocols aren't the only use case. For example, dealing with
large binary files may involve memory-mapped disk i/o, in which case
mapping directly structures accurately in memory is essential. Endian
works very well for this, and I don't see a need for special serialization.

--Neil