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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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| <hr> |
| <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> |
| Its 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>Some way to test archive portability within the Boost testing regimen. |
| <li>Integration into the Boost testing 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 immediatly 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 suprised |
| to find bottlenecks in totally unanticipated places and fixing those |
| has always lead 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 make programs that are guarenteed |
| the ability to load archives with classes of a previous version. |
| But there is not way to save classes in accordance with a |
| previous version. At first I dismissed this a 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 |
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