std.jgrandson

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 4 August 2014 at 14:18:41 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On Monday, 4 August 2014 at 14:02:22 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>
>> Do you consider structs primitive types? This is probably #1 
>> use case for JSON conversion.
>
> No, only types that cannot be broken down in to smaller pieces, 
> i.e. integral, floating points,  bool and strings.

That is exactly the problem - if `structToJson` won't be 
provided, complaints are inevitable, it is too basic feature to 
wait for std.serialization :(

>> http://forum.dlang.org/post/mzweposldwqdtmqoltiy@forum.dlang.org
>
> I don't understand exactly how that binary serialization works. 
> I think I would need a code example.

Simplified serialization algorithm:

1) write (cast(void*) &struct)[0..struct.sizeof] to target buffer
2) write any of array content to the same buffer after the struct
3.1) if array contains structs, recursion
3.2) go back to buffer[0..struct.sizeof] slice and update array 
fields to store an index in the same buffer instead of actual ptr

Simplified deserialization algorithm:

1) recursively traverse the struct and replace array index 
offsets with real slices to the buffer

(I don't want to bother with getting copyright permissions to 
publish actual code)

I am pretty sure that this is not the only optimized 
serialization approach out there that does not fit in a 
content-insensitive primitive-based traversal scheme. And we 
won't Phobos stuff to be blazingly fast which can lead to 
situation where new data module will circumvent the 
std.serialization API to get more performance.