On Oct 9, 2005, at 6:44 PM, Robert Ramey wrote:
I only took a very quick look at the diff file. I have a couple of questions:
It looks like that for certain types, (C++ arrays, vector<int>, etc) we want to use binary_save/load to leverage on the fact the fact that we can assume in certain situations that storage is contiguous.
Exactly.
Note that there is an example in the package - demo_fast_archive which does exactly this for C++ arrays. It could easily extended to cover any other desired types. I believe that using this as a basis would achieve all you desire and more which a much smaller investment of effort. Also it would not require changing the serialization library in any way.
This would lead to code duplication since we would need to overload the serialization of array vector multi_array valarray Blitz array ublas dense vectors ublas dense matrices MTL vectors MTL matrices ... not only for the demo_fast_archive, but for all archives that need such an optimization. Archives that immediately come to my mind are binary archives (as in your example) all possible portable binary archives MPI serialization PVM serialization all possible polymorphic archives .... Thus we have the problem that M types of data structures can profit from the fast array serialization in N types of archives. Instead of providing MxN overloads for the serialization library, I propose to introduce just one traits class, and implement just M overloads for the serialization and N implementations of save_array/load_array. Your example is just M=1 (array) and N=1 (binary archive). If I understand you correctly, what you propose needs M*N overloads. With minor extensions to the serialization library, the same result can be achieved with a coding effort of M+N. Matthias