Re: Cerealed v0.6.1: even less boilerplate for binary serialization

[Atila Neves via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 3 August 2015 at 09:27:03 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
On Monday, 3 August 2015 at 09:21:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
The summary is you can now write this:
    struct UdpPacket {
        static struct Header {
            ushort srcPort;
            ushort dstPort;
            ushort length;
            ushort checksum;
        }

        enum headerSize = unalignedSizeof!Header;
        alias header this;

        Header header;
        @LengthInBytes("length - headerSize") ubyte[] data;
    }


This deserialization will be identical to casting like this, 
right? (Not trying to diminish your work, just making sure I 
get semantics :))

align(1)
struct UdpPacket
{
    align(1)
    static struct Header {
        ushort srcPort;
        ushort dstPort;
        ushort length;
        ushort checksum;
    }

    Header   header;
    ubyte[0] data;
}

// ...

auto packet = cast(UdpPacket*) raw_data.ptr;

In this case, yes. In the real-life case I was simplifying, it 
wasn't a ubyte[] array, it was an array of structs with 
non-trivial serialisation that also depended on a previous 
deserialised variable. It was more like this:

struct Outer {
   static struct Header { ... }
   Header header;
   @LengthInBytes("length - headerSize") Inner[] array;
}

struct Inner {
    static struct Header { ... }
    Header header;
    @ArrayLength("length") Unit[] units; //actual length of the 
array instead of in bytes
}

struct Unit { ... }

So maybe not as useless after all ;)

Atila