On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 1:45 AM, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev@gmail.com>wrote:
I see. It would be great if the library provided a way to define the serialization format as a grammar separately from the object definition - perhaps similarly to how Boost.Fusion adapts structs or in pure C++ syntax without macros in Boost.Spirit style; whichever works best. The serializable_specification approach can be useful for tricky cases but as a general solution it doesn't provide a good readable description of the target format.
I agree - I've toyed with similar approaches, I have not yet found one I'm satisfied with.
One more question. Does the library provide a portable binary format for floating point numbers?
No, nothing reliable. Technically the little_endian and big_endian wrappers do use a floating-point host endianness flag, FRAMEWORK_HOST_ENDIANNESS_FLOAT, and adjust their behaviour accordingly, however the conversion implementations are extremely rudimentary at the moment. Ideally I'd like tie the implementation of those wrappers to Boost.Endian or similar; I don't believe a library specific solution is suitable here.