std.serialization: pre-voting review / discussion

[Jesse Phillips]

On Monday, 19 August 2013 at 12:49:48 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> I have had a brief look at Protocol Buffers and I don't see why 
> it wouldn't work as an archive. I would probably need to 
> implement a Protocol Buffers archive type to see what the 
> limitations of std.serialization and Protocol Buffers are.

I not familiar with the interaction of Archive and Serializer. I 
was overwhelmed by the number of functions I'd have to implement 
(or in my case ignore) and ultimately I didn't know what my 
serialized data would look like.

I think it is possible to output a binary format which uses the 
same translation as Protocol Buffers, but I wouldn't expect it to 
resemble a message.

>> Thrift and Protocol Buffers use code generation to create the 
>> language
>> data type, and at least for Protocol Buffers a method contains 
>> all the
>> logic for deserializing a collection of bytes, and one for 
>> serializing.
>> I'm not seeing how std.serialize would make this easier or 
>> more usable.
>
> If a Thrift or Protocol Buffers archive would be used with 
> std.serialization I'm thinking that one would skip that step 
> and have the data types defined directly in D.

I'll see if I can push my way through creating an Archive type.