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

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-27 14:45:49

Well, sounds like that would be 5 new archives and/or
derivations.  You've got a lot of work to do.

Robert Ramey.

Cliff Green wrote:

> Possible choices (some already discussed):
>
> 1. Absolute smallest space -

The easiest way to do this is to use a streambuffer
which has compression built in.  This is included
in the boost stream i/o library.  Using such a
stream will compress - almost to the max - any
of the boost archive types.

> 2. Absolute fastest speed

I doubt the native binary can be slower than anything
else as all it does is copy the bytes to the streambuffer.
Of course its not portable - but it will be the fastest.

> 3. Flexibility versus simplicity - e.g. whether object
> ids, tags, implicit structuring and nesting, etc are
> directly supported versus just providing support for
> fundamental types, and (relatively) simple sequences.

Without the "extras" its not going to be compatible with
boost serialization.  It might be useful in its own right -
but its not going to be the same thing.

> 4. Floating point support - IEE 754 formats only versus
> later standards (and long double), other non-typical
> floating point formats, and probably a host of other
> possibilities for binary floating point.

of course all floating point types are handled in a portable
way by the current text archives so this is just a binary
archive issue. (except for portable NaN and others
which is a general i/o rather than serialization problem)

> 5. Adherence to a commonly used (or even not that commonly
> used) protocol - XDR, CDR, etc.

If someone were really interested in this I would expect
that he could make some progress in this area.  I'm not
sure how useful it would be but who knows?

Robert Ramey