Matthias Troyer wrote:
This seems to be fine if all you want is compatibility at the level of the least common denominator. By checking if the value of an integer fits into 32 bits you make this library archive useless for people who might need compatibility between 64 bit platforms. What do you think about the following idea: the portable binary archive implements serialization for the fixed length integers (int32_t, int64_t, ...) and it is the user's responsibility to only use the 32 bit integers if they want portability to all 32 bit platforms. Also watch out that on some platforms even short and int are 64 bit.
Note that the version of portable_binary that is included with the demo addresses this issue - even though its no explicitly stated. It stores the integers in a compiler independent format - length - bytes using save_binary and restores them using load_binary. If it turns out that the saved integer_type from platform A is too large to fit into the loaded integer_type on platorm B it throws a run-time exception. Now if one uses say int32_t then he is guarenteed that on both platforms the integer will fit in 32 bit so the exception can never be thrown. (Well almost never, if someone stored a 64 bit integer in int32_t on platform A it would be a problem - but that's really a programming error of the user - and in any case one would get an exception) So in my view, handling int32_t and its bretheren shouldn't be any sort of issue. Robert Ramey