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. 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 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.