[GCC-XML] Xrtti.h

[Wesley Tansey]

>
> When serializing an array, the number of elements to serialize
> must be known.  Does your visual tool allow the selection of a field which
> the serializer should use as a "count" field?
Bingo.  For static arrays this obviously isn't necessary, but for 
dynamically allocated arrays, the user can specify a field which will be 
the count.

Wesley Tansey
Graduate Student
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
http://people.cs.vt.edu/~tansey/



Bryan Ischo wrote:
>> This is a great discussion so far.  I'm actually also working on a
>> similar tool to automate C++ serialization which uses GCCXML as its
>> first step.  My approach is different in a few ways though:
>>
>> 1. It uses a visual tool.
>> 2. It's intended for the high performance computing (HPC) community.
>> 3. As a result of 2, the serialization is to MPI, not sockets.
>>
>> We've encountered most of the issues you guys have discussed in the
>> email, and I think with the visual tool we've solved all of them.  The
>> tool allows the user to select a datatype from their program and then
>> gives them a treeview of the fields in that datatype.  Then they just
>> check off what they want to serialize and click generate.  The code then
>> gets generated to mirror MPI's normal Send, Recv, etc., calls so that it
>> looks like you're still using MPI calls but you're actually using the
>> code generated by the tool.
>>
>> If you guys are interested, we'll be submitting a paper on the complete
>> tool to ASE 2007 in early June.  I can post a link to the paper and the
>> tool's website when it's all ready.
>>     
>
>
> That is very cool.  Please, do keep us informed of your progress.
>
> A question though: when you say that you allow the developer to visually
> select the fields of the datatype to serialize ... how do you handle
> arrays?  When serializing an array, the number of elements to serialize
> must be known.  Does your visual tool allow the selection of a field which
> the serializer should use as a "count" field?  Or maybe you provide a way
> to enter a formula that the serializer can use to determine the count of
> elements in the array (expressed in terms of other fields of the data
> type)?
>
> One other application of serialization that I wanted to explore was object
> databases.  I have read a little bit about Berkeley DB, which is the
> simple database system (it's really not much more than a system of
> persistent hashtables from what I can tell, with extra add-on support for
> things like indexes, transactions, etc) that for example MySQL is based
> on.  Berkeley DB seems to me to be very robust and clean mostly due to its
> simplicity and focus: it deals *only* with saving blocks of data, it has
> no idea or care about the format of the blocks of data that you save. 
> MySQL for example saves blocks of data which it formats in ways that
> represent relational database tables.  I would be interested in using C++
> serialization to create blocks of data which were C++ objects.  Then you
> could use a C++ API based on C++ serialization and Berkeley DB which
> implemented a sort of database - more like a persistent C++ object storage
> mechanism, but I guess the addition of transaction and index support would
> make it more like a database.
>
> By the way - in terms of progress on Xrtti.  I finished the test cases
> last night, they all work.  I completed the "packaging" - for Linux
> anyway.  I have RPM spec files so that Xrtti can be easily built as an
> RPM.  What remains is:
>
> - Porting to other systems.  I don't have build processes set up for
> building on alternate systems (I use a make-based build environment that I
> have not tested on anything except RedHat Linux so far).  Also I rely on a
> portability layer of code which I have a Linux back end for but no other
> back ends (for example, no Microsoft Windows back end).
> - Testing with gccxml > 0.6
> - Better documentation in the form of HOWTOs and FAQs
>
> However, if someone feels that what I have would be useful to them despite
> the above, please let me know and I will put the code up on my web site. 
> It's all under the GPLv2, so you are free to use it in an open source
> project.  You cannot release a commercial project which uses it though -
> but let me know if you want to, we can arrange an alternate license at
> very reasonable terms :)
>
> Thanks, and best wishes,
> Bryan
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Bryan Ischo                bryan at ischo.com            2001 Mazda 626 GLX
> Hamilton, New Zealand      http://www.ischo.com     RedHat Fedora Core 5
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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