Darren Cook wrote:

...

Or you might try the following (non-portable) idea

ar & BOOST_SERIALIZATION_NVP( make_binary_object(str, (p - str)* sizeof(int)) );

Thanks, that is closest to what I was after; I don't need a portable version here.

...

But really, I think you might be best off replacing the class above with

class Example { std::slist<int> str; // or maybe std::vector<int> str }

It was done using a fixed size buffer to avoid dynamic memory allocation (mainly for speed reasons).

However as I worked through the class some more I found it can output a string representation, which uses fewer bytes. So in future I might add a parser for input and then switch to using that (though I'll be back to needing separate load/save functions then won't I, oh well :-).

A couple final observations: a) the make_binary .. implementation is maximal speed on a binary archive. It just streams the bytes to the i/o buffer. b) If you're concerned about binary portability and file size, take a look at the demo binary portable. It implements saving/loading of integers as variable length binary bytes so that a lot of the zeros are eliminated. c) if you're concerned about file size. You might consider using the streams library - currently pending review - to compress/de-compress the i/o on the fly as the data is saved/loaded. Robert Ramey