On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 07:53:25AM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I agree. OTOH, I think a full-fledged reflection library will be some ways > off. We could start with a bare-bones system designed to explicitly > support serialization, but I think it would slow down the adoption of the > existing serialization effort, and I'd rather not stir up more controversy > (unless there's a clear benefit to doing so, which I don't see). Once a > reflection library is more-or-less in place, extending it to handle > serialization will be relatively straightforward, whether with a brand-new > design or adapting it to an existing library.
In order to do serialization with reflection, there needs to be access to class hierarchy, and a system by which all fields that are to be serialized can be accessed and modified. However, fields that are serialized would not neccessarily, and in fact generally would not correspond to a single instance variable or an instance variable at all. The only additional capability not needed for the "bare bones" reflection library needed by serialization is access to methods, which IMO is the simplest. However, most reflection libraries, especially ones that attempt to automatically generate the data, will simply provide access to individual instance variables. For this reason, I think that developing a reflection library without serialization in mind might result in a library that is simply unusable for serialization. On the other hand, a serialization library that does not make use of a reflection library but does handle deserialization of pointers to derived types requires a system for registering class hierarchy. Also, a serialization library that is not based around reflection/meta data would be quite different from one that does. It therefore seems that if we were to implement a reflection library and a serialization library separately, and then tried to integrate them later, we would likely find that both would need to be partly or almost completely re-written. For example, the only part of a serialization library that is not based on using reflection data that could be reused in one that does would be the data-formatting code. - Jeremy Maitin-Shepard _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost