Dear Boost developers, I would like to share a contribution to the boost::serialization module. It provides an answer to the challenge of supporting portable binary archives by using the well-known and stable HDF5 library (http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5). After first signals of interest by other users I have decided to fully integrate my work with the current boost::serialization module. My suggestion would be for Robert Ramey and other interested developers to consider the inclusion of my work in the official serialization code. I am not sure about the exact procedure in this case. I have forked from the Git serialization archive. All supplied tests have passed for gcc on Linux and MSVC 10 on Windows. My work can be pulled from https://github.com/dk1978/serialization/tree/development To compile the new archive code, define the paths to the HDF5 installation using the variables HDF5_INCLUDE_PATH, HDF5_LIB_PATH, and HDF5_BIN_PATH either as environment variables or in "project-config.jam". An example using the new archive is also provided in the "example" subdirectory. Motivation for this work: The hdf5_archive project provides a new serialization archive format based on HDF5 to complement the ones already included in the boost::serialization library: plain text, XML, and native binary. By building on the established and well-known boost::serialization framework, application code can use HDF5 or switch to any of the other established archive formats with only minimal changes to the code involved. HDF5 has become a popular format to store scientific data. It is open and well-documented. Further advantages of HDF5 are the following: - the format is self-describing and portable across computing platforms - efficient storage of large arrays, parallel IO using MPI is possible (though not yet implemented) - hierarchical description of stored data - several low-level storage drivers, including single file or multiple-directory layouts - APIs to C, C++, and Fortran Best regards, Daniel Koester