On Nov 12, 2005, at 9:33 PM, Robert Ramey wrote:
Wrap up ======= I guess it should be pretty obvious that I believe that
a) The applicability and utility of a save/load binary optimization are narrow than claimed.
I gave four concrete examples of which three have already been implemented. Can you please substantiate your claim that it is narrower than claimed.
b) The claims of performance improvement are suspect.
I gave a benchmark code and results. What is suspect about it? Do you get different results on other machines? Please substantiate the claim.
c) This implementation doesn't address all the issues that need to be addressed for something like this.
Actually it does, as I showed in my reply to your observations.
d) Such an idea could be implemented in a much simpler, more transparent, robust, and efficient manner.
As I also argued in my reply to your proposal, this will not work because of intrusiveness. Also, why should your approach (besides the intrusiveness problems) be more efficient???
e) Such "special" implementation features are easily accommodated by the current library by extension. There is no need to change any of the core library implementation or interface.
The one problem with the core library is that the core library implements the serialization of C-style arrays by a for-loop over the elements. If you would separate this from the core library, then only a small change in this file would be needed.
Finally, I have to comment on the way this has been proposed. Checking a diverse group into the CVS system on a separate branch is not convenient for most people. This would better be a zip file uploaded to the vault. It should also include some sort of document outlining what its intended to do and how it does it. Had this been done, its likely that many more people would have had a look at it and been able to commment. I'm sure the issues i've noted above would be apparent to a lot of people and I wouldn't have had to spend a few hours preparing this critique.
I actually submitted the diffs to the list. I did this instead of a tarball of the entire archive since it is smaller and the changes are easier to see. In the submission I also outlined what was changed and why.
[snip]
I refuse to reply to personal and unfounded polemic attacks. Matthias