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- <title>Serialization - To Do</title>
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- <h1 align="center">Serialization</h1>
- <h2 align="center">To Do</h2>
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- <dl class="index">
- <dt><a href="#portablebinaryarchives">Portable Binary Archives</a></dt>
- <dt><a href="#performancetesting">Performance Testing and Profiling</a></dt>
- <dt><a href="#backversioning">Back Versioning</a></dt>
- <dt><a href="#nortti">Testing for Environments with No RTTI</a></dt>
- <dt><a href="new_case_studies.html">Additional Case Studies</a></dt>
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- These are enhancements that the serialization library needs but have not been done.
- Some of these projects, though tricky, are not huge and would be suitable
- for someone who has a limited time to spend on them. In particular, they
- might be of interest as student projects such as the Google Summer of Code.
- <h2><a name="portablebinaryarchives"></a>Portable Binary Archives</h2>
- Currently there is a portable binary archive in the examples directory.
- It is not regularly submitted to the exhaustive boost testing regimen
- but it is tested occasionally and has been used in production code.
- <p>
- It's missing the following:
- <ul>
- <li>Addition of portable floating point types. This is not trivial. In addition to
- handling floating point types of varying sizes, It requires
- handling invalid floating point numbers (NaNs) in a portable manner.
- <li>Integration into the Boost testing regimen similar to the other archive classes.
- </ul>
- <h2><a name="performancetesting"></a>Performance Testing and Profiling</h2>
- I've managed to setup performance profiling using the following:
- <ul>
- <li>current (as I write this) Boost.Build tools.
- <li>the gcc compiler.
- <li>and a shell script - profile.sh
- <li>library_status program from the tools/regression/src directory
- </ul>
- Invoking profile script produces a
- <a href="performance_status.html">table</a>
- which shows the results of each test and links to the actual
- profile.
- <p>
- The first thing I did was include some of the serialization library tests.
- It became immediately apparent that these tests were totally unsuitable
- for performance testing and that new tests needed to be written for this
- purpose. These tests would highlight the location of any performance
- bottlenecks in the serialization library. Whenever I've subjected my
- code in the past to this type of analysis, I've always been surprised
- to find bottlenecks in totally unanticipated places and fixing those
- has always led to large improvements in performance. I expect that
- this project would have a huge impact on the utility of the serialization
- library.
- <h2><a name="backversioning"></a>Back Versioning</h2>
- It has been suggested that a useful feature of the library would be
- the ability to create "older versions" of archives. Currently,
- the library permits one to make programs that are guaranteed
- the ability to load archives with classes of a previous version.
- But there is no way to save classes in accordance with a
- previous version. At first I dismissed this as a huge project
- with small demand. A cursory examination of the code revealed
- that this would not be very difficult. It would require some
- small changes in code and some additional tests. Also it
- would require special treatment in the documentation - perhaps
- a case study.
- <h2><a name="nortti"></a>Environments without RTTI</h2>
- I note that some have commented that this library requires RTTI.
- This is not strictly true. The examples and almost all the
- tests presume the existence of RTTI. But it should be possible
- to use the library without it. The example used for testing is an
- <code style="white-space: normal">extended_typeinfo</code>
- implemenation which presumes that all classes names have been exported.
- So, to make this library compatible for platforms without RTTI,
- a set of tests, examples and new manual section would have to be created.
- <hr>
- <p>Revised 1 November, 2008
- <p><i>© Copyright <a href="http://www.rrsd.com">Robert Ramey</a> 2002-2008.
- Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See
- accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
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