Mathias Gaunard <mathias.gaunard@etu.u-bordeaux1.fr> writes:
Sebastian Redl wrote:
Now I have a preliminary design document ready and would like to have some feedback from the Boost community on it.
The document can be found here: http://windmuehlgasse.getdesigned.at/newio/
I'd especially like input on the unresolved issues, but all comments are welcome, even if you tell me that what I'm doing is completely pointless and misguided. (At least I'd know not to waste my time with refining and implementing the design. :-))
I personally think that there is no use in distinguishing between text and binary I/O.
I think part of the issue may be the name "binary". A better name may be "byte" I/O or "byte" stream. Conceptually it seems important to distinguish between a byte stream and a character stream. At the C++ type level, however, it may indeed not be useful to distinguish between a "character" stream and a "byte stream", and instead merely allow streams of any arbitrary POD type. Then a "byte" stream is defined as a stream of uint8_t, and a character stream may be a stream of uint8_t or uint16_t or uint32_t, depending on the character encoding used.
For I/O, you need a binary representation. To get it, you can serialize your object any way you like. This shouldn't be the job of a "binary formatting layer", even though having separate utilities to serialize/unserialize basic types to common representations would be useful (double to Little Endian IEEE 754 Double-precision for example). Also, I believe the narrow/wide characters and locales stuff is broken beyond all repair, so I wouldn't recommend to do anything related to that.
I believe that this library will attempt to address and properly handle those issues.
I also think text formatting is a different need than I/O. Indeed, it is often needed to generate a formatted string which is then given to a GUI Toolkit or whatever.
Presumably this would be supported by the using the text formatting layer on top of an output text sink backed by an in-memory buffer. -- Jeremy Maitin-Shepard