I am interested in using boost serialization for a project I am currently working on, but two requirements are hurting me. First, the archives have to be portable. Second, it's critical to keep the message size under a certain threshold which the text archives blow through. So I am wondering if I can somehow get away with using a binary archive, even though my choices seem to be a non-portable version, or a unsanctioned tested version. Oh, and I am pretty much stuck using Boost 1.32. So, basically, I am wondering: 1. How non-portable is the non-portable archive? While this is a mixed windows/linux environment, all the computers are running as x86 or x86_64, so the endian is the same and word boundary restrictions are mostly the same. Unfortunately, the mapping of data types might not be the same. Is there a simple way to test this if the answer is "maybe"? 2. How stable is the portable archive? Reading through the release notes for 1.37 it seems like that the code is solid, except for encoding doubles, which would not be a problem. Of course, I am being forced to use 1.32, which might be much more unstable . . . Thanks in advance for any replies.