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

From: Cliff Green (cliffg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-27 16:41:18

  "Scott McMurray" <me22.ca+boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>FWIW, I'm currently using binary files for some work 
>because the text is huge and slow.
> 
>... down to 1.2 GiB instead of the 2.1 GiB for text
>... It also makes my load time drop from a few 
>minutes to a few seconds 

This has been my (somewhat limited application domain) 
experience, as well. Almost all of the distributed systems 
I've worked on that used binary message data passing did 
so for both processing speed and compactness of the data. 
Most of the system architects understood the "brittleness" 
and drawbacks of the design (specially when floating point 
values were needed), but were willing to make the 
tradeoff.

I'd love to be able to remove at least some of the code 
design and portability drawbacks for applications needing 
to pass (or read / write) binary data.

Cliff