David Abrahams wrote:
We want to be able to capitalize on the existence of those APIs, and to do that we need a "hook" that will be used whenever a contiguous sequence is going to be (de)serialized. No such hook exists in Boost.Serialization.
FWIW, this is what I do in my library: template<class W, class T, class A> void write(W & w, std::vector<T, A> const & v) { int m = v.size(); begin_sequence(w, io::type_of(v), io::type<T>(), m); if(m > 0) write_sequence(w, &v[0], m); end_sequence(w, io::type_of(v), io::type<T>(), m); } The default implementation of write_sequence just does: template<class W, class It> inline void write_sequence(W & w, It first, std::size_t m) { for(; m > 0; ++first, --m) write(w, *first); } but writers that support contiguous fast writes overload write_sequence( my_writer&, T*, size_t ). Looking at collections_save_imp.hpp: template<class Archive, class Container> inline void save_collection(Archive & ar, const Container &s) { // record number of elements unsigned int count = s.size(); ar << make_nvp("count", const_cast<const unsigned int &>(count)); BOOST_DEDUCED_TYPENAME Container::const_iterator it = s.begin(); while(count-- > 0){ //if(0 == (ar.get_flags() & boost::archive::no_object_creation)) // note borland emits a no-op without the explicit namespace boost::serialization::save_construct_data_adl(ar, &(*it), 0U); ar << boost::serialization::make_nvp("item", *it++); } } all that needs to be done is: template<class Archive, class It> inline void save_sequence(Archive & ar, It it, unsigned count) { while(count-- > 0){ //if(0 == (ar.get_flags() & boost::archive::no_object_creation)) // note borland emits a no-op without the explicit namespace boost::serialization::save_construct_data_adl(ar, &(*it), 0U); ar << boost::serialization::make_nvp("item", *it++); } } template<class Archive, class Container> inline void save_collection(Archive & ar, const Container &s) { // record number of elements unsigned int count = s.size(); ar << make_nvp("count", const_cast<const unsigned int &>(count)); save_sequence( ar, s.begin(), count ); } unless I'm missing something fundamental. So what's all the fuss about?