[Boost-users] Serialization and source code organization

From: Malte Clasen (news_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-11-24 20:17:05

Hi,

I'm currently trying to use the new Boost 1.32 serialization library to
save the state of a medium complex program (about 10.000 lines of code).
The problem is that the serialization lib seems to require very close
source code coupling: The translation unit that contains the load/save
functions for the application has to see all serialize() method
definitions (as they are templates). That means that I cannot rely on
forward declarations, so I always have to include the respective header
file. This slows down the compilation noticably and results in errors
such as "C1204: compiler limit : internal structure overflow" and
"C1055: compiler limit : out of keys" (VC++ 7.1), as more or less all
significant headers are included in this translation unit.

The documentation is aware of this kind of problem and recommends manual
  instantiations of the serialize() methods (in the PIMPL section). Do I
get something wrong or is this the only solution? I don't really like
manual template instantiations, but in this case I can't imagine another
way to deal with it, except waiting for the next VC++ release and hoping
for the best.

Malte