Robert Ramey wrote: Robert, can I first of all ask you to use a mailer, or a news reader, which preserves threading? Recently experiments have shown that Mozilla Thunderbird, for example, works fine both with emails and with NTTP gateway, and it's free. You can also try some other clients, but please do something about the issue.
The idea of the library, as I see it, is to provide object serialization, but - without the overhead serialization library has - with extra layout tweaks
Yes, it would be nice.
For objects of the type being discussed, (i.e. no pointers, no class versioning, no memory tracking of duplicates, etc) the serialization library has no extra runtime overhead.
I was not talking about runtime overhead. To output something, I need at least include appropriate archive headers. Last time I looked, they were large and complex. This makes me nervous about including them in every source file I have. Basically, I want every call I define to have a 'dump' method which can be called from debugger. So, I need output facilities available in every translation unit.
I would be very surprised if the serialization library did not result in smaller and faster code than the libraries being discussed.
Hmm... maybe serialization won't be much worse performance wise, but all the levels of indirections which are there won't speed things up, that's for sure. But anyway, speed is not my concern.
I don't see why it's necessary to reinvent the object traversal code which is already in boost::serialization. For example, boost::serialization support scoped_ptr. It would not make sense to add separate support for scoped_ptr in outfmt.
The serialization library has all that and much, much more.
Yes, we know that.
I would need to delve further into boost::serialize to have an oppoinion - and the unfortunate thing is that I won't have any available time soon :(
Too bad, it would have consumed much less time than has been already spent on this topic
If function output formatters is helpful for making output more easily presentable, fine. Though G. Rozenthal's, experiment makes me doubt this.
Which experiment?
I believe the demos and documentation in the serialization package show that it to be much, much easier to use than the proposed library for this purpose.
Robert, while I agree that serialization is immensely usefull, the point you make above is a bit skewed. Which example in the serialization library shows how to change start/end delimiter of a vector? - Volodya