Nicola Musatti wrote:
Peter Dimov wrote:
Sorry for not following the thread properly, just a quick note:
(e.g. serialization support for core libraries should be supplied by serialization and not core [as I believe it is now, at least in many cases]).
This is not right. Serialization support for class X should be provided by X.hpp and it must be possible to do this without depending on any other header.
I don't agree, except in the rare cases where serialization is one of the core responsibilities of the class. The one thing that I realize is often unavoidable is providing the serialization mechanism access to a class's private state and I consider this rather unfortunate.
If your serialization methods - allow creation of objects whose invariants do not hold, or - expose implementation details in the external representation, they are broken.