LOL - well it IS surprising. Take a look at the documentation for the class serialization trait "Implementation Level". This touches upon a really big issue with a library such as this. Question is which do you do: a) always the right thing b) always the same thing - and maybe emit a warning or error when its not a good idea Choosing b) makes for a transparent system and this is what I usually prefer. Generally I detest hidden features, attributes, which make things look easier but in fact produce surprising side-effects. When tthings fail it means a huge effort trying to get to the bottom of things - often the only recourse is by trial and error. a) is much more popular today. It seems easier and makes a better demo. And its seductive - let's design it so "it just works". If there is one program in my whole life which has tested my sanity its Microsoft Word. (next in line might be bjam). In practice I usually prefer b) but sometimes - like this one - I give myself a pass and slip into a). In this case it was deliberate design decision to "do what the user probably wants if he doesn't otherwise specify it". In spite of my prejudice generally against this kind of thing, I think in this case it has worked to advantage as I have gotten very few complaints and problems about it. There might be a few other places where something similar has been done - but these would also be exeptional cases. So I sympathize with your point of view in general, I just don't think its the correct one in this particular case. Of course, if one is going to do something like run 1 TB through the serializer, he really should carefully read the manual, and carefully consider what he's doing. I wouldn't trust me to have done the right thing . Robert Ramey gast128 wrote:
Thx for the answer. My point is that if you nowhere specify a load/store through pointer, the following code stores just multiple copies:
for (int i = 0; i < 100; ++i) { const SomeStruct s; oa << s; }
but this behavior seems to change if somewhere a store through is performed. This was for my surprising.