Re: [Boost-users] [serialzation] Portable binary archives

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-04-08 12:33:12

The original design was made as a demonstration of how to derive
from an existing archive class to make a new one.  Unfortunately,
this example was broken by changes to binary_?archive on
which it was based.  So I made a new correct version of
portable binary archive and its in the trunk.  It has been tested
with a large variety of compilers.  The tests also included
writing archives on one machine and reading back on a
different architecture.  This my best shot for portable binary archive so 
far.

Many thanks to Cadence Design (Israel) for supporting this work and 
permiting it
to be included in Boost.

What's missing is the following:

a) add floating point types.  We now we have a portable floating point
utilities library that will be helpful.  There have been a couple of
good suggestions for a portable floating point format but I haven't
seen any implemented.  There are number of questions and decisions
here - use XDR primitves, limit to IEEE, etc.  which many
will want to chime in on.

b) I need to remove the "case study" which describes portable
binary archive and replace it with a more instructive one - like
using derivation to add your own special attribute to an xml_archive
or something like that.

Actually - these might be interesting GSoC projects.  They are actually
small enough to be completed in a summer. (well b) is anyway)

Robert Ramey

François Mauger wrote:
> Hi again Christian,
>
> I just downloaded the stuff and run a test prog, it seems
> to be exactly what I need.
> I'm now creating a wrapper package to handle the whole stuff
> and make it easy to enter my package and build system.
>
> Of course I need to do more tests under different Linux flavors
> using 32 and 64 bits architectures (and also MacOS X) but it
> already looks great!
>
> Many thanks for this work (and underlying stuff by other people).
>
> frc