Serialization with Boost.Serialization
Channel: Utah Cpp Programmers
Date: 2022-08-12

Many times you need a stable, versioned, archivable representation of your internal data structures. Serialization is one means of achieving this goal. Serialization is often used with REST APIs as a means of conveying data structures into and out of your application. XML and JSON formats are commonly used to encode your data structure. But serialization often is not just a data format.

How do you represent different versions of your data structures as they evolve over time? How do you ensure that old versions of your data structures interoperate with new versions of your data structures and vice-versa? While interoperability and backwards compatibility are an application responsibility, versioning itself is something you want from your serialization layer.

This month, Richard Thomson will give us an introduction to serialization via the Boost.Serialization library, one of the older and more mature boost libraries having first been contributed to Boost in 2002.

Boost.Serialization documentation: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_79_0/libs/serialization/doc/index.html
Boost.Serialization source: https://github.com/boostorg/serialization

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Past topics: https://utahcpp.wordpress.com/past-meeting-topics/