25 Jan
2021
25 Jan
'21
6:11 p.m.
see Ron Rivest’s s-expression serialization:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt
of course, now we have json....
On Jan 25, 2021, at 8:38 AM, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I guess I don't quite understand that. I can get how it works for simple data types
(integers, floating point numbers, perhaps strings) but it seems like it breaks down
pretty quickly for anything with a more complex representation (structures with multiple
members, for instance; how does one deal with padding, etc?). "Reader makes
right" makes some sense for any pair of sender/receiver architectures, but once you
have more than a handful of machine types with potentially different
ABIs/representations/alignment requirements, etc, then it seems like you're an n^2
mutual ABI understanding issue. Perhaps I'm being naive in assuming that multi-data
structures are just written out in host format, but if you, say, write element by element
to avoid that, then it seems like you're already nearly at an architecture
independent data representation anyway, so what does NOT having that buy you? I guess
it's potentially faster if you don't have to swab bytes between similar
architectures?