Fernando Cacciola <fernando.cacciola <at> gmail.com> writes:
And as I said, based on experience (*), arguing on which one is more correct would quickly wind up in an endless discussion as the number of participants goes up. If you request a fast track review, it would set time limits on discussions.
I could or could not agree with now, but only to have someone else arguing for the current semantics in the near future.
So I'm much more interested on which one is more generally useful to the most users.
Ok, lets look at it from a different angle. Documentation compares optional<T> with variant<T,nil_t>. The latter is not InputStreamable even if you make nil_t InputStreamable. Boost.Variant is only OutputStreamable. Users seemd to be happy (but I'm not a maintainer to say for sure).
Robert's reply seems to indicate that the serialization library doesn't require the current semantics.. is that so? can this be verified?
$ grep -rl optional_io boost/serialization/ <no matches> BTW, serialization implements its own Boost.Variant serialization. Alex