Hughes, James wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-users-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Cliff Green Sent: 26 June 2007 23:58 To: boost-users@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [Boost-users] [serialisation]Portable Binary Archives
Probably answered before, but I wondered whether there is a standard implementation for portable binary archives available.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "standard implementation" - there are a number of commonly used portable binary approaches or standards. For example, XDR (IETF standard) has been around for quite a while:
When I looked at this it seemed to me that XDR only dealt with primitive types. So it would seem easy to make an XDR archive. Such an archive would have all XDR types, but would have some data members relevent to serialization - like obect ids for tracked types. This would still be XDR compatible but its not clear that it would still be portable for other languages like say FORTRAN. Perhaps it might be possible to make an XDR archive which would not permit things like serialization of pointers.
as well as SDXF (not sure how much it is used):
Don't know anything about this.
There's CDR, used in CORBA and other libraries or frameworks where interoperability is needed:
I made a very cursory examination of CDR and it seems an enhancement of XDR. It does have the concept of structures and object tags so its concievable that one might make a CDR archive.
If you're talking about portable binary archives for Boost.Serialization, there's been talk, but I'm not sure what the status is - anyone have an implementation? I'd be willing to help / work with someone on it.
Talk to John Rade.
That's what I am looking for. We need to get the file sizes down. We could use text (XML is great for debugging but too big for final release), but again that has its overheads. We generally don't use floating point so that may help us. The link I posted does have a portable implementation which I think uses IEEE754. I just wondered if there was an official boost:serilisation version; obviously not!!
I don't think binary archives are going to be smaller than the equivalent text archive. native binary archives are built for speed, text for portability, and xml to satisfy those who feel they need it. Robert Ramey