Henrik Jacobsson wrote:
cyclic objects can't be serialized. cyclic object pointers can be serialized with no special effort.
A simple, and probably naive, idea... Since pointers mean no problems and objects do, would it not be possible to have an option "serialize_object_as_pointer" and for containers "serialize_members_as_pointers" in the library, as a means to circumvent this? That way one would not have to change the implementation of all containers of cyclic objects into containers of pointers...
I don't think this would work for a couple of reasons - mainly that if you save objects that arn't pointers, the loader would create pointers and you wouldn't have the same thing that you started with.
Alternatively, or additionally, within the cyclic object themselves, it would be nice if it was possible to serialize the pointer without serializing its contents, i.e. creating only an index in the archive, making it up to the user to make sure that the object is later serialized with that index to adress it.
That's more or less how the serialization of pointers works now - and that's why it DOES work. Robert Ramey