[ENet-discuss] ENet Util?

[Brian Hook]

Just a thought here, but it might be nice to have an ENet utility 
library that is separate from (and even downloaded separately) from 
ENet that provides stuff that is often considered application level 
yet which is common enough that code can be reused.

Generic delta compression is an obvious candidate.  Encryption is 
less of a candidate because of the rather extensive design choices 
necessary (asymmetric vs. symmetric, key exchange, key size, etc.).

I think big one though is serialization to byte streams which would 
automatically handle endianess and alignment.  This includes 
serialization of 16-bit, 32-bit and float quantities, along with 
strings.  I think the API would be something like:

ENetuStream *enetu_stream_create( void *, size_t );
void         enetu_stream_destroy( ENetuStream * );

void         enetu_stream_rewind( ENetuStream * );

void *       enetu_stream_get_raw( ENetuStream *, size_t );
float        enetu_stream_get_float( ENetuStream * );
double       enetu_stream_get_double( ENetuSTream * );
enet_uint8   enetu_stream_get8( ENetuStream * );
enet_uin16   enetu_stream_get16( ENetuStream * );
enet_uint32  enetu_stream_get32( ENetuStream * );

//Also assume serialization versions of the above

Then when you need to dump a bunch of stuff into a packet, you can 
simply do:

ENetuStream *s = enetu_stream_create( NULL, 12 );

enetu_stream_write_float( s, 1.0f );
enetu_stream_write_float( s, 0.0f );
enetu_stream_write_float( s, 0.0f );

p = enet_packet_create( s->data, s->size, 0 );

And deserialization would work in reverse, where the stream is 
created with the packet's data.

Brian