From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-24 11:24:10
David Abrahams wrote:
> To be fair, I haven't done the analysis: are you sure your approach
> doesn't lead to an MxN problem (for M archives and N types that need
> to be serialized)?
Yes, it does, in theory. Reality isn't that bad. For every M, the archive
author has already added the necessary overloads for every "fundamental"
type that supports optimized array operations. This leaves a number of
user-defined types n (because the number is smaller than N), times M.
In addition, even if the author of an UDT hasn't provided an overload for a
particular archive A, the user can add it himself. The m*n number for a
particular codebase is bounded, and the overloads are typically one-liners.
Looking at
http://listarchives.boost.org/Archives/boost/2005/11/97002.php
the difference is that you have a "please call ar.load_array" specializable
predicate instead of a "please overload this function" customization point.
Is this the latest version of the proposed design?