Re: [Boost-users] [serialisation]Portable Binary Archives

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-27 14:29:48

Hughes, James wrote:

> Thanks for that comment on sizes Robert - will bring that to the table
> when we next talk about serialisation here!!!!

Just to clarify.

Suppose you have an archive with a lot 4 byte integers whose values
contain small numbers - 1 or two digits.  The text archive would
represent this as:

1 24 14 2 7 ...

averaging 3 bytes for integer

while the native binary archive would represent the values as
4 bytes per integer.

I don't remember about floating point format off hand.

So... whether the text or binary is larger or smaller would
depend on the specific case.  I doubt that there is a huge
difference either way.

Robert Ramey