"Robert Ramey" <ramey@rrsd.com> writes:
I have one question about this.
What is the ultimate purpose. That is it just to optimize serialization of certains types of collections of bit streamable objects? or does have some more ambitious goal.
I thought I highlighted the ultimate purpose quite clearly already: ,---- | For many archive formats and common datatypes there exist APIs | that can quickly read or write contiguous sequences of those types | all at once (**). Reading or writing such a sequence by | separately reading or writing each element (as the serialization | library currently does) can be an order of magnitude more | expensive. `---- We want to be able to capitalize on the existence of those APIs, and to do that we need a "hook" that will be used whenever a contiguous sequence is going to be (de)serialized. No such hook exists in Boost.Serialization. (**) Note that this capability is not necessarily tied to bitwise serialization or the use of a binary representation. In particular, I took special pains to clarify above (**) that this is *not* merely about "serialization of certains types of collections of bit streamable objects." If that's unclear, maybe you could ask some specific questions so that I know what needs to be clarified. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com