Re: [boost] Re:Serialization and Reflection

[Matthias Troyer]

On Wednesday, December 18, 2002, at 02:24 AM, Robert Ramey wrote:

From: Matthias Troyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

I would like to make a comment here: our aim was just to achieve
portability between all different UNIX variants. We have about ten
different UNIX architectures around, but actually no Windows machines.
Thus, for our purposes XDR provides a perfect and portable binary
format which we have ben using without problems for more than eight
years.

is it possible to snag the xdr source code from FreeBSD unix so it can
be compiled for windows? I believe that the license would be boost friendly
I would love to include an xdr portable binary implementation but I think that
its appeal would be much diminished if itcouldn't be used by windows.
After all, its whole motivation would be is archive portability.

I can look into that.

I believe that this addition would make it portable to all platforms
in common usage today (including Apple - based on freeBSD?).

It already works on Apple's Mac OS X.

I think we have one more disadvantage:
e) will not be able to deal with polymorphic objects, since there are
no virtual template functions

the virtual functions eliminated would be those currently in *archive.
user classes would be the same.  Bascially instead of inheriting from
basic_[i|o] archives would be specialization of something like


class biarchive
{
	biarchive & operator <<(int i)
	...
}

then save/load would look like

template<class Archive>
void save(Archive &ar, T& t)
{
	ar << member1;
	...
}

Here we have a problem as far as I can see: if the class is polymorphic, how can I serialize the derived class by calling the save() function of the base class?

Matthias

_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost