Re: [boost] C++ committee meeting report

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Klaim - Joël Lamotte wrote:

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 2:53 PM, beet wrote:

...

Any chance of bringing Boost.Serialization in for C++17 ? It is established and in production use since years, and Robert did a great job with this library.

There is work going on for adding (compile-time) reflection to C++. I'm not sure if it makes a serialization library obsolete (there is no voted proposal so far if I understand correctly) but my understanding is that the committee first want reflection to base solutions on for fixing networking issues.

AFAIK, the committee has never held even preliminary straw polls on any relationship between networking and reflection. The Reflection Study Group is still at a very early stage, and has no complete proposal before it, let alone started to build a Reflection TS working paper. The LEWG has held a couple of straw polls on starting a Networking working paper, and if those are any guide the LEWG is not in a mode to wait for anything. There is only one way to find out what the LEWG would think about a Serialization library proposal. Write the proposal and submit it. If a Serialization library proposal would be much stronger with compiler support, then the proposal can include a requirement for compiler support. But until the committee and its sub-groups has a written proposal before it, nothing happens. Think of Type Traits. If the Library had waited until there was full language support for type traits as a language feature, we would still be waiting. When the standard library added type traits, with a requirement for compiler support, it was clearly understood that future events could make the type traits library obsolete. That didn't stop the addition of John Maddock's type-traits library. Same thing could happen with serialization. --Beman