Re: [boost] [modularization] Extract xml_archive from serialization

On 09/19/2014 09:20 AM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:

On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 9:53 PM, Vladimir Prus wrote:

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On 09/18/2014 10:29 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:

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In principle there should be no reason for e.g. time_serialize.hpp to include Boost Serialization headers in order to define the "load" or"save" function templates needed for serialization.

For example, to define:

template<class Archive> void save( Archive & ar, const posix_time::time_duration& td, unsigned int /*version*/) { .... }

one doesn't need to include any serialization headers.

That's true as far as general C++ goes, but you'd very likely need to use BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP - and for XML archives it's required to use it - and it's a macro, so two phase lookup won't help?

Sure, one can write a serialization library that makes this kind of definition impossible. My point is that in principle it is possible and if there is a general agreement to refactor important libraries to reduce physical coupling then it is something that can be done.

This is even more important for a library like Serialization because any data type may need the ability to be serialized yet many (most?) programs that use such types will not serialize them.

Yes, it's possible in principle, and even with current serialization code, but it's not clear that replacing BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP(data_member) with boost::serialization::make_nvp("data_member", data_member) is net win. - Volodya