Re: Which libraries in Boost are mature enough to be used in real applications?
brass@mailvault.com wrote:
David Abrahams wrote:> >
....and how does the introduction of versioning "create a steady-state
model" of the serialization domain? Do you honestly believe that not
adding versioning would have made a difference in that regard?
--
I think the "versioning" stuff was a mistake also. Isn't a utility
program that converts data once a better approach than adding
"versioning" code to an application and it being executed each
time you run the application? In the Boost serialization library
documentation, Ramey refers to Microsoft as being a pioneer
in "versioning." Is there a performance cost associated with
opting out of the "versioning" party?
For me, it wasn't so much the performance penalty, which I imagine
would be incremental, but the potential for pollution of the concept
space.
The whole point of serialization is to provide mental relief. Boost's
version of it, IMO, was close enough to "good" that the the parts I did
not like could be simply over looked - without the versioning.
The versioning ruined things a bit because it detracts from the notion
of type integrity. It implies that two different types are actually
the same type with a bit of tweakage of one type and not the other.
That might be true if a human is watching, but the moment you surrender
to this notion, the moment your type system starts to degrade. And
with that comes a degration of form, and if you go to the extreme, you
end up with an amorphous mess, so much that you forget that
serialization was supposed to provide mental relief. Note that this
entire paragraph could be applied equally to XML.
I prefer to focus my hard thinking on carefully crafting my types to be
persistent with regard to what is being modeled. If I discover later
that I had insufficient foresight, I can simply create a *new* type to
accommodate the deficiency and serialize that rather than use
verisoning.
-Le Chaud Lapin-
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