std.serialization: pre-voting review / discussion

[glycerine]

On Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 07:40:13 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> I have documented the package for what it is, not for what it's 
> not. It's a package for serialization, not a RCP or network 
> package....
>
> You seem to like me to write a comparison to Thrift in the 
> documentation. You have to make the comparison yourself.

Wishful thinking aside, they are competitors. The fact that you 
haven't already done this comparison is unfortunate. I've already 
done that comparison, tried Orange, and found it wanting. If you 
don't want everyone else to do the same, you should answer the 
questions outlined so that it can be positioned appropriately in 
people's minds.

If you'd like examples of how to present design rationale, using 
contrast for illustration, consider the example of Stroustrup's 
presentation of C++ features in any of his several books. 
Contrasting analysis is often essential in describing the 
history, design and rationale for your work; the "related work" 
section of any technical publication is required by reviewers. 
You should provide it if you don't want your work to be dismissed 
out of hand.

Many if not most modern serialization libraries do address 
transport, and it is critical to the most common use case for 
serialization: as a developer, I want to move data between two 
different environments, be they hosts, memories, disk, process, 
thread, or different languages; so that I can store and process 
data non-locally and in a non-sequential fashion.

For Orange, you can simply say that you have no transport 
support, and perhaps describe why you don't consider it (e.g. 
what use case were you designing for?), and that will suffice to 
answer number three (3).  In addition, there are still eight 
other salient issues.

I provided this outline to assist you in describing your work. 
You'll need to be more specific about where you are confused if 
you don't understand a particular issue. Ignoring issues won't 
make them go away, it will just make others ignore and go away 
from your work.