In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 10:52:45 +0100 Matthias Troyer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Thus to summarize, I propose to split the serialization archive into a > serialization engine, doing the serialization of the basic types, and > an archive class which takes the engine as a template parameter.
I'm not convinced about that split. I suspect the archive format will often need control over how basic types are represented. Also, I suspect there ought to be some provision for meta-data at the basic types level. For example, I might want the archive to store the size and byte-order of ints on the save platform, so that the load platform can convert if need be. I only want to store this once per archive, not once per int. It really belongs in the archive preamble, which must be defined by the archive. So in at least some cases, the engine and the archive are not very orthogonal. In practice I don't see that many situations where I would want to mix and match archive formats against basic type engines. In general you seem to be concerned about low-level issues, and minimal overhead. I, on the other hand, will be disappointed if we don't get a library capable of serialising to XML. > a "bottom up" approach I prefer the breakdown into orthogonal pieces, as we've been discussing with Augustus. It would be nice if the mechanism for registering and creating polymorphic types could be used independently of serialisation, rather than being layered on top of it. -- Dave Harris _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost