Brian Braatz wrote:
Question- I was just looking for clarification. Does the boost serialization library allow me to have objects on different platforms stream to each other?
Yes. However, the archive must be designed to be platform independent. This is a little bit more subtle than it would first appear. For example, consider the text archive. It stores all numbers as text delimited by spaces. That's portable. But suppose a machine which uses an 80 bit IEEE double stores a high precision value to an archive. Another machine that reads the archive might only have a 64 bit double. So, some of the original precision would be lost. Of course the original value would have been preserved to the extent possible on the new machine. Even here, moving to an ebcdic machine would require a custom codecvt facet which is not in library. Is this "portable"? You be the judge. Within the limitations of the above, text and xml archives can be considered portable. The binary archive is really "native binary" in that it doesn't make conversions for integer size or endianness. (It does check that the endianness and integer size are the same on the saving and loading machines so it might be portable between some pairs of machines). In general the binary archive should be considered non-portable and not suitable for archives meant to be transferred from non identical architectures. There has been lots of interest in making an XDR and CDR archives. I really haven't considered issues in using XDR or CDR. I don't know whether these are just standards for encoding low level types or describe a whole protocol. If it's the former, it would be pretty simple implement. Otherwise, we have the problem of matching the serial representation of some arbitrary C++ structure with some externally defined protocol. Though it might be possible in certain cases, this is not something that the serialization system has been designed to do. http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/boost/msg63695.php The package includes a "portable" archive as a demo. It doesn't include code for floats and longs. The portable archive includes a lead byte for each integer indicating the number of bytes required to hold the value. If the integer doesn't "fit" in the loaded type, an exception is thrown. The usage of boost::uint_16 etc. doesn't have to be explicitly considered. I didn't have good method for handling floats and doubles across machine architectures. Now that I have suitable code for handling portable floats/doubles, (http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/boost/msg63672.php), I might think of promoting portable_binary_?archive to a first class supported archive. It would be complete and general, but depend on the serialization library being implemented on the "other" machine. Not an unreasonable restriction in my view. For those who must have CDR/XDR I have no final answer. Robert Ramey