Ian McCulloch wrote:

Does something like this structure make sense for the boost serialization library?

FWIW, my views on this subject are pretty much on display in the demo_portable_binary example shipped with draft #18 of the boost serialization library. If I have time, I may add support for floating point and move some code to templates to speed it up. But basically its very simple and addresses all known portability issues as far as I know. Robert Ramey