Matthew Vogt wrote:
Is anyone else interested in using Robert Ramey's serialization library for the purpose of marshalling data into pre-determined binary formats?
Interest has been expressed for XDR in the past. Basically, I see this as a very positive thing and want to do everything I can to support your efforts. Your code supports save and load for two new formats (XDR and CDR). This is a valuable contribution. I'm also pleased that the serialization library has been deemed (at least by one person) to be worthy of investment of such an effort ( 1500 lines of code !). I took a little time to scan your attachments. My examination was cursory and feel free to correct any thing I didn't get right. Here are my comments. 1) I wonder why you derived ordered_oarchive from basic_binary_oprimitive<Archive, OStream> . It doesn't seem that any of the functionality basic_binary_oprimitive actually used. I presume the same goes for ordered_iarchive . 2) there's some stuff in boost that addresses alignment in a guaranteed? Portable manner that may relevant here. Sse #include <boost/aligned_storage.hpp> . BTW - the best way to make your code portable without cluttering up with #ifdef etc... is to use more boost stuff - let other people clutter up their code with #ifdef all over the place. 3) I'm curious about the override for the saving of vector. It seems to me equivalent to the one included with the system. And if vector requires special treatment, what about the list, et al. This doesn't seem necessary to me. Perhaps the fact that I did treat strings specially was misleading. I considered this a special case. I don't think vectors are in this context. 4) Missing license, authorship etc. Also add more comments and description and explanation of motivation for things that might not be obvious. This is a work of literature and art that will live for a long time - make it worthy. 5) I took great pains to organize code so that users of the library would not be including things that were strictly implementation. This is the origin of the *.ipp files. You might want to consider the same. Any template that does have a serializable type as a parameter (ie only archive) is a candidate for this treatment. In fact I would like to see a more "formal" separation of interface and implementation. 6) Get the bjam system running if you haven't already. It would be quite easy to add your archives to the set tested. Currenty, the test system runs about 30-40 tests on each archive type. It's a torture test ( and still I'm finding bugs). I think it would take you maybe an hour to tweak the bjam script and the code in serialization/test/test_tools.hpp to run all the tests on your own archive classes - ( maybe I should add information on doing this to the manual - it never occurred to me that someone would get to this point so soon) This is an absolute must if you want to have your addition seriously considered. 7) I'm just a little queasy about using the term marshalling. In fact any of the archive implementations could be used for marshalling - not just a binary one (XML is the favorite flavor of the month). So I think it's sort of misleading. I think it is very helpful that your naming scheme xdr_oarchive, cdr_oarchive, leverages on the existing one. 8) in my native binary archive, I used a template parameter for the stream class. As it stands, I don't test or use the corresponding archive for wide character streams because the WEOF would need special treatment. I haven't spent any time on this. Perhaps you've addressed this in some way. I didn't look in that much detail. I suspect that's enough to keep you motivated. Good luck and thanks for working on and with the library. Robert Ramey