Hi, First, and concerning the more general problem of serialisation: one often comes across a situation where a library encodes a very complex and opaque value of type Foobar.t, but offers no dedicated (de)serialisation functions. The assumption is of course that users can just use Marshal and be done with. There are however situations for which Marshal is badly suited. Long term storage is one, and portability is another. Moreover, if the value is an object and you wish to carry it across process boundaries, using Marshal is just not possible.
Take also into consideration that the Sexplib syntax extension makes it trivial to add (de)serialisers to a data structure. The litmus test for considering this task should be "is there any reasonable situation where users of my Foobar library would like to serialise Foobar.t values in a portable and long-term manner?". If the answer is yes, I reckon it wouldn't be too much to ask that the library adds support for Sexplib. Note that in the paragraph above, "Sexplib" may be substituted by another serialisation mechanism. And this gets us to the question of performance numbers you speak of. In fact, besides performance I would like to bring other variables to the table: - ease of use - "future-proofness" - portability - human-readability Sexplib scores very good on ease of use, future-proofness, and portability, and reasonably good on performance and human-readability. My guess is that bin-prot has better performance but worse portability and future-proofness, and nill human-readability. Marshal gets top scores in performance and ease of use, but fails miserably in future-proofness, human-readability, and portability. As for my particular problem with PXP DTDs, I will look at writing a (de)serialiser by hand. According to Gerd it shouldn't be too much trouble. Best regards, Dario Teixeira _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
