[phobos] Interest in having a serializer in Phobos?

[David Simcha]

Absolutely.  I'm not sure Orange is ready for prime time yet (not saying it
isn't, just that I haven't tested/reviewed it yet) but IMHO serialization
definitely belongs in the standard lib.  It's a relatively small (in the
sense that a whole app would never be built around it; I'm not implying it's
trivial), widely useful piece of functionality.  For such pieces of
functionality having to go out and find and install a 3rd party library for
even simple one-off use cases is a major hassle.  If you're writing a
library, as opposed to an application, that needs serialization, using a
third party serialization library is basically asking for dependency hell.
For these reasons pretty much any language that claims to be mature, modern
and high level has serialization in the standard lib.  I know Java, PHP and
Python do.

One specific use case of where I'd love a serialization lib in Phobos but
would never use one if it were a 3rd party lib is my Plot2kill lib.  I'd
love to use serialization for completely lossless saving of plots (i.e. you
save a plot, you open it and can do everything you could before you saved
it), but not enough to introduce a dependency to the project.

On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Jacob <doob at me.com> wrote:

> Is there any interest in having a serializer in Phobos? I have a serializer
> compatible with D2 which I licensed under the Boost license. This is the
> description from the project page:
>
> Orange is a serialization library for D1 and D2, supporting both Tango and
> Phobos. It can serialize most of the available types in D, including third
> party types and can serialize through base class references. It supports
> fully automatic serialization of all supported types and also supports
> several ways to customize the serialization. Orange has a separate front end
> (the serializer) and back end (the archive) making it possible for the user
> to create new archive types that can be used with the existing serializer.
>
> It's not very well tested but if there's some interest I'm hoping on
> getting more people to test the library. The project page is:
> http://dsource.org/projects/orange/
>
> /Jacob Carlborg
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