I think that the points below can have multiple solutions, and that the points are orthogonal. Different formats should be able to mix and match desired solutions. Keep in mind that some formats might completely exclude some of these problems. I have brief repsonses below, and yes, it seems we mostly agree :)
Dave Harris wrote: >> What should a serialization library provide that iostreams doesn't? > >(1) Archiving of polymorphic pointers. Loading the archive needs to >create objects of the dynamic type rather than the static type. (I >don't believe we have a good solution to this yet?) I still haven't closely examined Robert's solution, but I recall there was a (heated) discussion. I see that you might implement it very differently depending on the meta-data stored. >(2) Archiving of shared objects. If two pointers point to the same >object on saving, they should still point to the same object on >loading. Presuming the deserializing application is written in a language that supports aliases. A minor point, but this kind of point caused our serialization vs persistance discussion--serialization is allowed to be lossy and not support some language features. Persistance would guarantee this in all cases, whereas it would depend on the format when serializing. >(3) A canonical scheme for managing versioning. We talked about this in other emails :) >(4) Space efficiency. Eg metadata such as version information should >be stored once per class rather than once per object. I want to provide a service for gathering meta-data, but let formats store it however they please. >(5) Support for a variety of formats, with different trade-offs. >Including (a) efficient formats; (b) human-readable formats; (c) >platform independent formats; (d) standard formats such as XML. I want >to be able to switch between formats without changing the code in my >user-defined types. I can't tell if you want third parties to create formats, or if you want a serialization library to provide them. It's my intent to let other people write formats (except for a few examples). Overall, I guess I'm looking for a loosely bound set of services to ease the burdon on a format writer. Cheers- Augustus __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
