[Boost-users] [serialization] Treatment of corrupt archives - assert vs. exception throw

Hi folks, I'm dealing with binary archives which may have been corrupted enroute to my code. My naive expectation was that the serialization library should throw an exception when it encounters something in the input stream it doesn't understand (in which case my code can react gracefully). But, I've found that: 1. There exist cases where serialization will just assert and bring down the process 2. The documentation suggests that an exception should be thrown, but I didn't find any strong statement of this, so I am not sure whether it is a contract of the library. My first and most pressing question is: is it a guarantee of the library that invalid input should result in an exception and not an assert? If this is not so, I think it should be documented much more clearly. If it is so, then this message is a bug report. There's an assert in archive/basic_binary_iprimitive.hpp:98 that can be triggered if the bytes in the archive which represent a bool actually contain a value other than 0 or 1. One can trigger this in a test case like so (on x86_64 Linux, at least): ========== #include #include #include <fstream> int main() { { std::ofstream of("archive.bin", std::ios_base::binary); boost::archive::binary_oarchive oa(of); unsigned char i = 2; oa << i; } { std::ifstream f("archive.bin", std::ios_base::binary); boost::archive::binary_iarchive ia(f); bool b; // note different type than what was saved, but same size ia >> b; // assert! } } ========== Let me know if this is a bug that I should report to the tracker, or a feature. Thanks, -Gabe