David Abrahams wrote:
"Peter Dimov" <pdimov@mmltd.net> writes:
David Abrahams wrote:
"Robert Ramey" <ramey@rrsd.com> writes:
I was expecting to see your enhancements for arrays to get included and for collection_size (or whatever) to be part of this. I'm not sure what status of this is and/or if it conflicts with the recent feature freeze.
IMO the size_type change should be considered a bugfix, as it was not possible to portably serialize collections without it.
The change is not trivial. Using a size_t typedef means that program A can write an unsigned int and program B can read an unsigned long. This will appear to work at first because the serialization library doesn't include archives where this is significant. Yet.
I don't know exactly how to interpret your remarks. It sounds like you're describing the status quo here, which would seem to argue that the change is necessary.
The status quo is that the size of the container is consistently written or read as an unsigned int, is it not? Consider the simplistic example: void f( unsigned int ); // #1 void f( unsigned long ); // #2 void g( std::vector<int> & v ) { unsigned int n1 = v.size(); f( n1 ); // #1 size_t n2 = v.size(); f( n2 ); // ??? }