There might be people interested. You might upload it to the vault. You don't have to write a test program. You can use all the boost archive test programs with your own archives by following the instructions in the documentation Reference/Archve Class Reference/ Testing. The batch file run_archive_test.bat will run all the tests with your archive. Robert Ramey troy d. straszheim wrote:
Hi Robert, boost...
I've implemented a portable binary archive, wondering if there is general interest. I've tested (very thoroughly) on our target platforms, which are 32 and 64 bit linux, and osx on a g5, each platform reads and writes archives written by the others, down to the bit.
The archive itself is stored little-endian (as the vast majority of my users are on intel hardware) so big-endian platforms are responsible for byteswapping, though this could be configurable. The problem types are (unsigned) long int and long double. For long int, the archive checks to see if it is small enough to fit into 32 bits, if so it stores it in 32 bits, otherwise it throws. For long double, it just throws, as that's 12 bytes on some platforms, 16 on others, no good way to handle this, and the type is seldom used anyhow. Float and double are assumed to be ieee754, and are just handled as blocks of 32 or 64 bytes. So if the write succeeds, the read is guaranteed to.
Part of the idea here is that without resorting to widespread use of int32_t and friends, 4-byte-long platforms are always be able to write archives readable on 8-byte-long platforms. On 8-byte-long platforms, you could write archives readable on the smaller machines, but best to choose either int or long long int or a typedef thereof (int32_t or int64_t).
The code is at http://svn.resophonic.com/pub/boost, in
boost/archive/detail/portable_binary_archive.hpp boost/archive/portable_binary_iarchive.hpp boost/archive/portable_binary_oarchive.hpp libs/serialization/src/portable_binary_iarchive.cpp libs/serialization/src/portable_binary_oarchive.cpp libs/serialization/test/portable_binary_archive.cpp
Issues that come to mind: The test isn't boost-test, that'd need rewriting. Haven't tried any of this on microsoft. Maybe there is some preferred way to detect endianness. The decision to go little-endian was relatively arbitrary, maybe the byte-swapping should be configurable. A possibility I considered was to upgrade all 32 bit longs to 64 bit and do the range-check/throw when *reading* (We nixed this idea, preferring to have the error come up sooner rather than later), maybe this should be configurable as well. There's surely platforms out there with other differences that aren't handled, I don't have a good feel for whether they would make the archive useless to a wider audience. The tests require having access to binary archives written on other platforms, haven't yet thought about how to put that together in the boost build/test context.
So have a look, let me know if you're interested. Thanks again for a great lib.
troy d. straszheim
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