native binary archives are generally NOT portable accross platforms. This is highlighted in the documentation an is the motivating factor in preparing the demo demo_portable archive. Text base archives are meant to be portable, but of course at the cost of speed and archive size. I did a tiny bit of googling and found that Nan isn't the only issue. There is also +/- INF . So the whole subject would need a more thorough treatment Robert Ramey Austin Bingham wrote:
a) I believe that native binary archives will handle this without out change as they just copy the bits to the archive and back. As long as you read the archive on the same compiler/os/machine, there should be no issue.
I think I've been misinterpreting this bit here. I originally took this to mean that the binary archives are not portable across platforms. Is this the case, or is it just that NaN specifically isn't portable (to non-IEEE 754 machines, I guess)? In the end, we're hoping to use the binary format anyway, and i can work around the text format limitations since I'll only be using it for debugging.