Re: [boost] Library addition request

Subject: Re: [boost] Library addition request
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-06-13 07:31:02

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 5:45 AM, Damien Buhl <damien.buhl_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 11/06/2016 20:17, Gerrit Daniels wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I've written a library that implements automatic serialization of user
> > defined types. You can find it here:
> https://github.com/gerritdaniels/ctrl.
> > I was wondering if this is something that could be added to the boost
> > library.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> >
> > Gerrit Daniels.
> >
> Hello,
>
> I just looked briefly to the README of your library, and what I see is
> that most of the advantages of the library comes from the reflection
> facilities you've built.
> But I can be wrong, as I didn't looked more than that..
>
> I think that yet-another Boost.Serialization doesn't make that much
> sense, however I think that a Reflection library, which generates easily
> traits about structs/classes to iterate upon, get information about name
> and so on would make sense.
>
> Currently in Boost.Fusion we need a bit of that to adapt structures and
> classes to tuples, and therefore we generate in the same way as your
> library some meta information like struct_member_name. But Boost.Fusion
> is not intended to be a reflection library, so it won't go further than
> that.
>
> What would be awesome in my opinion, from a library like yours, would be
> to reflect type information and get the reflected information be
> compatible with current libraries which leverage/could leverage such
> information like:  Boost.Spirit, Boost.Serialization, Boost.Fusion,
> Boost.Hana...
>
> It's just my 2cent and my opinion, I think there was already effort for
> a reflection library, but I think the effort stopped.
>
> +1

If you haven't done so already, you also might want to look at
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0194r1.html

IIUC, that proposal is progressing through the standards committee, and may
move to the working paper (i.e. next) stage as soon as next week at the
Oulu meeting.

--Beman