Re: Which libraries in Boost are mature enough to be used in real applications?
brass@mailvault.com wrote:
After giving it more thought, I think I framed things poorly in my
previous post. A server may have to simultaneously support
clients at different version levels. So support for multiple versions
is important. Thanks for the reply.
I agree with your original agreement. ;)
There are at least two ways to look at versioning, from the user's
perspective and from the programmers perspective. Naturally, the user
should be shielded as much as possible from variations in versions.
But IMO, the programmer should not allow pseudo-polymorphism in his
type system to accommodate different "versions" of the same type.
They are not the same type. XML fanatics are often victims of this
line of thinking.
When you have a structure type T1, which you discovere should have
included another unsigned long int and another float to be "regular",
you should add the two extra fields, but then the new type, T2, is not
mereley "a new version of T1".
When you serialize T2, you should keep this in mind.
Your observation that it is better to use behind-the-scenes conversion
utilities, IMO, is correct.
-Le Chaud Lapin-
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