Boost Serialization Library

Boost.Org is an organization dedicated to providing C++ libraries that provide advanced features for C++ programmers. These libraries are distinguished by:

High quality - before being accepted as a boost library, candidates are subjected to an extremely rigorous peer review system to assure utility, correctness, and elegance of design.
Portability - all boost libraries are subject to testing on a variety of compilers and operating systems.
Correctness - exhaustive test cases for each library
Power - many boost libraries use advanced C++ features such as template meta-programming to make libraries more flexible and powerful.
Breadth - the code base in the boost libraries is extremely large and varied.

After a formal review, my submission has been accepted in to the boost library. It is part of the standard boost distribution starting at version 1.32 released 17 November 2004. If you are new to boost and want to use the serialization library, I recommend you install the latest boost distribution. This is available at Boost.Org. You can view the documentation of the latest boost serialization library here.

For those curious about what construction of a library like this entails, I've written a paper "Making A Boost Library" which I presented at the OOPSLA '05 conference.

Current Status of Release of the Serialzation

My current version of the serialization library can be downloaded here. It has been tested against the latest boost release as of this writing (Boost 1.34). The results of tests on my own machine can be seen here. I expect this version to be included in Boost 1.36.

Here is an excerpt from the release notes in the documentation.

Differences from Boost 1.35

The library is now thread safe. That is, multiple archives can be open in different threads. This has been implmented with a lock-free algorithm to avoid any performance bottlenecks.
Serialization of types defined in shared libraries is now supported. shared libraries (DLLS) can be loaded/unloaded dynamically at runtime. This includes the serialization of types of abstract base classes so that a program can be written so as to be compatible with as yet undefined and un-implemented code.
The extended type info system has been enhanced to in order to implement the above. It is now a general purpose system for creating and casting of types about which is only known a string ID and an abstract base class.
All bug reports filed as TRAK tickets have been addressed.
As of this writing, the library will fail build on older compilers such as MSVC before version 7.1 and older versions of Borland compilers. This may or maynot change in the future.
In previous versions, all types serialized through a pointer were automatically "registered" as a side-effect. This made it unnecessary to explicitly register or export these types if they were subsequently serialized through a pointer to a base class. On rare occasions this created some difficulties by instantiating undesired code and made the requirement for registration and/or export dependent on the sequence of operations. So any type that is to be serialized through a base class pointer must be either explicitly registered or exported. This might break some code and result in the throwing of "unregistered type" exception.

Differences from Boost 1.34

Enhanced support for fast serialization for native binary archives. By Mattias Troyer.
Improved implementation of "export" functionality. Removes header ordering requirement and eliminates the maintenance of a pre-determined list of "known archives" By David Abrahams.
Improved support for STLPort.

Interested parties can check the current status of my tests here

Help me out!

For testing the library, I use the library_test script included in boost 1.35. I can only test with compilers shown on my local machine. If you want to help me test this package you can do the following:

Update your own copy of the latest boost release.
Download this package.
Move the contents of this package to the corresponding places in the directory structure of your boost installation.
Set your current directory to libs/serialization/test
Invoke ../../../tools/library_test.sh (or .BAT)

This (or some minor variation thereof) should produce a library status table similar to the one displayed here. In interested in getting feed back from any compilers not not listed here.

Late breaking news

I will be giving a class at Software Development '08