From: Cliff Green (cliffg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-27 12:21:39
>> ... endian library
> It looks as though it hasn't been proposed for review:
> http://www.boost.org/more/formal_review_schedule.html
>
> ... quite a bit of discussion about it, with many
>interesting
> ideas/additions/alternatives raised, so a mini-review
>(or something)
> would probably happen.
It's been a while (almost a year?) since Beman uploaded
his endian utility. Beman, is endian-06.zip the latest, in
the vault?
Is the first step in creating a portable binary archive
collecting and summarizing the discussions from a year ago
and performing a mini-review to make the endian utility
part of Boost? This would provide endian utility for
integral types. The floating point utilities from Johan
(which I haven't looked at yet) would need a place to
reside (they could reside in the serialization archive,
but it seems natural to have them as a separate utility).
I'm going to look at the example serialization code - one
concern I have (at this point an uneducated concern, since
so far I've only casually read the serialization docs) is
that I'd like a way to use a binary archive that doesn't
have the "metadata" that is normally provided in
serialization archives - I want to be able to read / write
or send / receive buffers of packed binary data where I
have complete control over every byte - I don't want type
ids, version numbers, pointer sharing semantics, etc
(unless I explicitly put them in my code). I realize this
is an orthogonal concern to the portable binary mechanics,
but I wouldn't be surprised if the users and applications
wanting compact and efficient binary archives overlap
significantly with the users and apps wanting control of
every byte in the stream.
Cliff