On 2011-08-07 00:09, dsimcha wrote:
On 8/6/2011 5:38 PM, jdrewsen wrote:
AFAIK David Nadlinger is handling serialization in his GSOC Thrift
project that he is working on currently.
/Jonas
Good to know, but what flavor? As I see it there is a three-way tradeoff
in serialization. In order of importance for distributed parallelism,
the qualities are:
I can answer these tradeoff for the Orange serialization library,
http://dsource.org/projects/orange/.
1. Efficiency. How much does it cost to serialize/unserialize something
and how much space overhead is there?
I haven't done any measurements but I would guess it depends on which
archive type is used. The actual serializer tries to do quite a lot,
where possible, at compile time. But it also stores a reference for
every serialized value, in the case a pointer points to the value.
2. Flexibility w.r.t. types: How many types can be serialized? How
faithfully are they reproduced on the other end w.r.t. things like
pointer/reference/slice aliasing?
If I haven't missed something Orange can serialize almost all types,
except unions, function pointers, void pointers and delegates.
3. Standardization: How universally understood is the format? Can it be
used to send data across different CPU architectures? Across languages?
Is it human readable? Is it based on some meta-format like XML?
Currently, the only available format is XML.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
