"Emil Dotchevski" <emildotchevski@hotmail.com> writes:
I don't think it is unreasonable to require that users register each class and archive type before they use them together. If portability is not a problem for someone, they can stick this registration in a global object in the cpp file that defines the class, and suffer later when they port to another system.
More work than necessary. Ensuring a particular TU's initializations are done is trivial. It's just that the library can't (portably) do it for you.
Even if portability was not an issue, I would still do the registration "manually". I don't think the author of class foo should be the one who decides whan archives will be used to serialize objects of class foo. Besides, what if I want to use class foo but I will never serialize it? The physical coupling introduced by the "automatic" registration will link all kinds of dead code to my executable. No, thanks.
No need to be concerned with that; you can put the uses of EXPORT in a separate header that includes the other header. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com