I think having something like uniform_type_info in Boost would be really nice. But it also conflicts with boost.serialization in a way. The "uniform type conversion" itself is quite messy (as you'll see for yourself in the sources). And it's expensive due to all the string operations, so you really want to make sure this is performed only once and then stored in a singleton of some description.
________________________________________
From: Boost [boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] on behalf of Dominique Devienne [ddevienne@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2014 09:35
To: boost@lists.boost.org
Subject: Re: [boost] Is there any interest in a library for actor programming? serialization + uniform names
On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 9:24 AM, Charousset, Dominik
The serialization and uniform name really boils down to the uniform_type_info class:
Uniform names are simply a necessity if you need to identify a type based on its name. The goal is to send any kind of value to a remote machine and being able to deserialize it. If you have platofrm-independent names, you can simply prefix the binary serialized value with its type name and then get the RTTI (uniform_type_info) from the type name and deserialize the rest of the data.
This is precisely why I requested such a uniform type name feature during the typeindex review, but many didn't seem interested in that, and didn't want typeindex to provide it, mainly punting to a future "library" on top of typeindex. I think it's unfortunate, but since you seem to have solved this, I hope this could be revisited in light of this new info. Thanks, --DD _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost