On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 1:14 AM, Marsh Ray <marsh@extendedsubset.com> wrote:
On 04/28/2011 10:15 PM, Scott McMurray wrote:
On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 18:43, Marsh Ray<marsh@extendedsubset.com> wrote:
Rather than a machine and compiler-dependent binary IO facility based on iostreams, I'd rather have a simple, minimal, portable binary streaming interface that handled endianness and alignment well for wire-representation defined structures.
<iostream> brings in a huge header tree with 99% unnecessary functionality for binary protocols. The more efficient the headers, the better. Functions that didn't need to read could just include the header for writing, and vice-versa.
Would you be fine with it working on streambufs? That way you'd only need<streambuf>...
The last time I messed with streambufs (some years ago) I came to the conclusion that they could not be accessed multithreadedly in a natural way. I tried to define my own custom ostream channel and it took hundreds of lines of code to get something that just functional and not optimized. IIRC, streamsize was defined to be a signed int and not 64-bit clean.
<snip> Perhaps you are looking for something like the following? http://github.com/Beman/Boost-Btree/blob/master/boost/btree/detail/binary_fi... It is implemented in terms of posix open/close/read/write, so is about as close to the metal as you can get. It needs more work before it is ready for general use. I've used something similar for many years, but never had time to get it ready for Boost. --Beman