Emil Dotchevski wrote:
I don't think it is unreasonable to require that users register each class and archive type before they use them together.
I'm not the person that has to be convinced. Frankly it was easier to implement the functionality than to convince a large number of people that such functionality wasn't necessary.
If portability is not a problem for someone, they can stick this registration in a global object in the cpp file that defines the class, and suffer later when they port to another system.
I don't think they will suffer any with the compilers we've seen so far.
Even if portability was not an issue, I would still do the registration "manually".
Note that there is nothing preventing you from doing this. In fact in some special cases, it is actually required - see demo_pimple.
I don't think the author of class foo should be the one who decides whan archives will be used to serialize objects of class foo.
I don't think so either and I don't think the current implementation requires this.
Besides, what if I want to use class foo but I will never serialize it? The physical coupling introduced by the "automatic" registration will link all kinds of dead code to my executable. No, thanks.
Actually this doesn't occur. Code is only generated for those archives, and only those archives. whose headers are included. The only "dead code" is for those classes "exported" and serialized with a particular archive class. The code is there but may never be called. But its unknowable at the translation unit level so it has to bethere in case some other translation unit creates one of these things to be serialized. So its not even clear that "dead code" is the correct thing to call it. Maybe its only dead code because most optimizers work at the translation unit level. But even global optimizers can't know what some DLL is going to create - etc. Honestly, I think there are more subtilties to this question than first apprears and I think that a deeper examination would lead one to the conclusion that most of them are handled by the library in an effective, practical and correct manner. Robert Ramey