Flurry

To continue work on the structured streams transport I decided to get rid of the XDR data representation, as well as slightly awkward boost.serialization library.

boost.serialization is very nice and robust, but it has some quirks, like not being able to save things by value.

ar << true << false << "Hell yeah"; // Cannot do this

I encountered a very nice library called msgpack. It provided quite efficient packing of small integers and looked reasonably simple. But the C++ wrappers it provided around the C core were extremely horrendous - their main purpose seems to be for RPC mechanisms where you define and transfer tuples of given types. Making it serialize a bunch of simple fields and then load them back seemed extra hard.

The library seems to be in transition to msgpackv5 but itself doesn't support all of the features outlined there.

I decided to make a simple and very dumb serializer to msgpackv5 format from the ground up. The default implementation supports several types from ints and strings to boost::optional<T> and some STL containers.

If your type consists of a series of supported types, it's easy to serialize it as well, just define two shift operators similar to how iostreams work.

inline flurry::iarchive&
operator >> (flurry::iarchive& in, my_type& value)
{
    in >> value.member1 >> value.member2;
    return in;
}

inline flurry::oarchive&
operator << (flurry::oarchive& out, my_type const& value)
{
    out << value.member1 << value.member2;
    return out;
}

It has a few downsides, which I didn't yet get to fixing:

• requires public access to value members, although you can always declare the operators as friends.

It also has some nice properties:

• having defined the above, container types like std::vector<my_type> are automagically supported.

Of course this is still work in progress and I expect it to slightly change, maybe move away from msgpackv5 specification a bit - it seems to have some illogical cases.

The current implementation is available as part of arsenal library here. Unit test shows how to use it. And the spec will have the latest details about the data format.