This is a great discussion so far. I'm actually also working on a
similar tool to automate C++ serialization which uses GCCXML as its
first step. My approach is different in a few ways though:
1. It uses a visual tool.
2. It's intended for the high performance computing (HPC) community.
3. As a result of 2, the serialization is to MPI, not sockets.
We've encountered most of the issues you guys have discussed in the
email, and I think with the visual tool we've solved all of them.
The
tool allows the user to select a datatype from their program and then
gives them a treeview of the fields in that datatype. Then they just
check off what they want to serialize and click generate. The
code then
gets generated to mirror MPI's normal Send, Recv, etc., calls so
that it
looks like you're still using MPI calls but you're actually using the
code generated by the tool.
If you guys are interested, we'll be submitting a paper on the
complete
tool to ASE 2007 in early June. I can post a link to the paper
and the
tool's website when it's all ready.
I missed Wesley's original message, so I'll reply here...
We tackled many issues regarding serialization for MPI in the
creation of the Boost.MPI library [1]. Our approach to serialization
was to use the Boost Serialization library [2], a C++-only library
that can serialize to a variety of different formats. The Boost
Serialization library requires users to manually specify a
"serialize" function, although we would greatly benefit from a tool
that could automatically generate this serialize function from source
code.
On the MPI side... Boost.MPI allows one to send/receive any C++ data
type, performing (de-)serialization automatically via the Boost
Serialization library when necessary. Serialization either maps down
to a series of MPI_Pack/MPI_Unpack calls or, when possible,
generates derived MPI data types to let the MPI implementation
serialize on-the-fly. We had a paper in EuroPVM/MPI last year
describing the techniques we use to do this efficiently in C++ [3];
the extended version is under review at the moment, but I'll be happy
to send a preprint to anyone interested in this approach to
serialization for MPI.
- Doug
[1] Boost.MPI. http://www.generic-programming.org/~dgregor/boost.mpi/
doc/
[2] Boost.Serialization. http://www.boost.org/libs/serialization/doc/
[3] Prabhanjan Kambadur, Douglas Gregor, Andrew Lumsdaine, and Amey
Dharurkar. Modernizing the C++ Interface to MPI. In Proceedings of
the 13th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting, LNCS, Bonn, Germany,
pages 266--274, September 2006. Springer. _______________________________________________
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