On 3/28/06, Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> wrote:
"Olaf van der Spek" <olafvdspek@gmail.com> wrote in message news:b2cc26e40603280426m1c14752do996f84adf0455ab6@mail.gmail.com...
Hi,
When reading/writing binary streams, you often need to read/write an (unaligned) integer in big, little or native endian. Is there support for this in Boost?
Back in 2000 there was considerable Boost discussion of endian integers. Darin Adler and I and some others contributed.
We came up with a set of requirements that implied a surprisingly large feature set. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 byte integers and unsigned are required. Unaligned for all, aligned for 2, 4, and 8 byte flavors. Both POD
Isn't aligned when you have unaligned just an optimization?
and non-POD flavors were requested.
How does POD apply to this?
Must work correctly regardless of char being signed or unsigned. Must work correctly even when internal and external number of bits differ. No manual configuration. No optimization (supposed optimizations turned out to be pessimizations all too often between CPU's, compilers, compiler versions, or even when a compiler switch was changed).
IIRC, almost everyone in the discussion had a set of roll-your-own classes, but none were Boost ready.
And no work was done after the discussion? That's a shame, because I think it's really needed.