Jeff Flinn wrote:
Dominick Layfield wrote:
My problem is that I just don't see when pointer serialization would be a big win. But I can't tell if I just have a limited perspective. That's why I was genuinely hoping that you could provide a concrete example.
See http://www.adi.com/products_sim_ad_de.htm. This product maintains numerous connections between model ports. Among numerous other under-the-hood pointers, there are containers of connections which are pairs of boost::shared_ptr<Port>'s. The state of the entire system is saved/loaded to/from file using boost::serialization. This would be undoable without the ability to serialize pointers, and such a facility in my mind could not be called a serialization library.
You are the second person to cite an example of serializing shared_ptr. The question is about raw pointers.