On Fri, 18 Jun 2010 00:29:50 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
There's one larger submission that needs review - Masahiro Nakagawa's
std.msgpack. I think it would be great if this community established a
review process. To do so, we should abstract away starting from at least
one review :o). Here's Masahiro's work:
code: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/374829/std/msgpack.d
doc: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/374829/std/msgpack.html
zip: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/374829/std_msgpack.zip (archives code and
doc)
Feel free to comment here.
Andrei
First, +1 to the review process.
Second, a lot of the design and examples are very similar to the MsgPack
reference implementations, which are all Apache licensed. Since some of
these design decisions seem to not be 'D'-ish (more on that later) this
raises questions on just how clean room the implementation was.
Third, there's a lot of things that shouldn't be in the final module.
-Should be removed:
SimpleBuffer, VRefBuffer/vRefBuffer,
-Redundant with other parts of phobos:
BinaryFileWriter => LockingTextWriter, mp_Type/mp_Object/mp_KeyValue =>
std.variant
-Should be moved elsewhere
DeflateFilter/deflateFilter => zip/zlib
Forth, msgpack was designed to be a simple, wire level encoding of some
higher structure. As opposed to JSON or XML, you are not going to be
modifying it dynamically. The very concept that it would use buffers
internally, particularly the existence of the "zero-copy" buffer, baffles
me. (Not to mention it leaves one open to aliasing bugs.) MsgPack has to
decorate every single type it stores, so there is nothing "zero-copy"
about it. To that end, I think MsgPack/MsgUnPack should wrap an input or
output range as appropriate and be able to be used by a general
serialization library such as Orange.
Other little things,
-Why isn't nil mapped to null?
-Why isn't there any big warnings about serializing cycles?
