Actually, I am trying to improve my serialization of mersenne_twister, and the previous test was a useless test to debug it. I have gotten a little further now, I think I have the "save" correct. I'm not sure about "load". I have been trying to follow the example of collections_load_imp. It uses "stack_construct" and "reset_object_address". I'm having trouble finding where the use of these is documented and whether I need them for my case. So far the mersenne_twister relevant code would look like: (In MT, compute() returns the elements we want to save, and to restore we just load the array 'x' directly.) template<class Archive> inline void save (Archive &ar, const unsigned int) const { for (int j = 0; j < state_size; ++j) { UIntType x = compute (j); ar << boost::serialization::make_nvp("item", const_cast<const UIntType&>(x)); } } template<class Archive> inline void load (Archive &ar, const unsigned int) { for (int j = 0; j < state_size; ++j) { stack_contruct<Archive, UIntType> t (ar); ar >> boost::serialization::make_nvp ("item", t.reference()); x[j] = t.reference(); ar.reset_object_address (??? } i = state_size; } template<class Archive> void serialize(Archive & ar, const unsigned int file_version) { boost::serialization::split_member(ar, *this, file_version); }