On Dec 7, 2009, at 7:08 PM, Robert Ramey wrote:
The "real" solution which I envision is just to suppress tracking in an archive. [...]
If such facility were implemented, one would proceed something like this.
create an output stream. This would not be a file stream but rather be plugged into a communication channel. If asio doesn't have something like already, I'm sure a "channel_buffer" would easily be crafted. Open this stream and connect to the other application.
Then open the archive using this ostream as an argument. On the other side of the channel open an archive using an istream (with this channel_buffer type).
Then your in business !!. The sending side just uses the << operator to send any data it want's while the other side just uses the >> operator to reconstruct any data sent. Easy as pie !
So, to my way of thinking, that's the real solution.
While that is an interesting solution to some problems, I don't think it actually helps with my use-cases (multiple). As mentioned earlier, turning off pointer tracking is not an option for me in some cases. I can envision various ways to deal with that. If one had a means for determining whether serializing a data structure used or would use tracking one could use this approach now, with no [further] changes to the serialization library. However, none of my existing use-cases are stream oriented. They are instead all transaction / packet oriented. This means there needs to be a clear boundry, where all output to be generated by the archive has been flushed to the buffer collecting the data, any "end of archive" data needs to be written, and the next transaction / packet needs to include any "beginning of archive" data needs to be written again. Right now I'm accomplishing that by deleting the old archive and creating a new one. I'm looking for either a lighter weight alternative to that (preferably), or a way to make that delete / recreate lighter weight.