On Sep 14, 2005, at 2:57 AM, troy d. straszheim wrote:
Hi Robert, boost...
I've implemented a portable binary archive, wondering if there is general interest. I've tested (very thoroughly) on our target platforms, which are 32 and 64 bit linux, and osx on a g5, each platform reads and writes archives written by the others, down to the bit.
The archive itself is stored little-endian (as the vast majority of my users are on intel hardware) so big-endian platforms are responsible for byteswapping, though this could be configurable. The problem types are (unsigned) long int and long double. For long int, the archive checks to see if it is small enough to fit into 32 bits, if so it stores it in 32 bits, otherwise it throws.
This seems to be fine if all you want is compatibility at the level of the least common denominator. By checking if the value of an integer fits into 32 bits you make this library archive useless for people who might need compatibility between 64 bit platforms. What do you think about the following idea: the portable binary archive implements serialization for the fixed length integers (int32_t, int64_t, ...) and it is the user's responsibility to only use the 32 bit integers if they want portability to all 32 bit platforms. Also watch out that on some platforms even short and int are 64 bit. Matthias