Request for review - std.serialization (orange)

[Matt Soucy]

On 04/01/2013 04:54 PM, Kagamin wrote:
> On Monday, 1 April 2013 at 19:37:12 UTC, Matt Soucy wrote:
>> It's not really strange, because of how it actually does the
>> serialization. A message is recorded as length+serialized members.
>> Members can happen in any order. Packed repeated messages would look
>> like...what? How do you know when one message ends and another begins?
>> If you try and denote it, you'd just end up with what you already have.
>
> Well, messages can be just repeated, not packed. Packing is for really
> small elements, I guess, - namely numbers.
>

And therefore, it supports arrays just fine (as repeated fields). Yes. 
That last sentence was poorly-worded, and should have said "you'd just 
end up with the un'packed' data with an extra header."

>> In your example, you'd want to send each individual result as a
>> distinct message, so they could be read one at a time. You wouldn't
>> want to pack, as packing is for sending a whole data set at once.
>
> So you suggest to send 1 message per TCP packet?

Unfortunately, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about networking, but 
that's not quite what I meant. I meant that the use case itself would 
result in sending individual Result messages one at a time, since 
packing (even if it were valid) wouldn't be useful and would require 
getting all of the Results at once. You would just leave off the 
"packed" attribute.