Am Friday 27 November 2009 08:00:12 schrieb Brian Wood:
"runtime field" ?
field that exists only at runtime. I was assuming serialization used for persistence. non-serialized field.
usually when you do want to add a serialized field you'd also want old versions of the file still to be readable, so you end up writing custom (versioned) deserialization code anyway, even if your language has built-in serialization support.
I recommend avoiding the versioning support in Boost Serialization. It runs counter to good development practices by averting the type system. Consider for example a class called Account that uses versioning to support multiple releases of a product. In the usual case, later releases will have more fields and added complexity than earlier releases. Support then for a client at an early release, say 1.1, becomes inefficient since Account is being used to
that's a very specific case. you can use different types for versioning using boost.serialization. more often you want the evolved types to handle old files/streams/...
code for you, using e.g. OpenC++, GCC-XML, or Doxygen, but I doubt those generated functions would stay there very long.
I'm not exactly sure what you are saying here, but if a user is simply improving the names of some of his fields, the functions won't stay the same very long. Automating this helps with a
the same as above, that most serialization functions you might want to generate automatically at the start of a project end up being custom serialization functions anyway.
common problem of forgetting to update the serialization functions and the compiler then barking. I don't claim though that every class should be handled this way. The C++ Middleware Writer allows users to turn off the automated generation of marshalling functions if that is desired. In my experience, it is unusual to turn that functionality off.
I don't want to start anything, but you already spend the better part of your messages on this list advertising your ebenezer thing, so I don't think we need yet another discussion about it.