C++ Serialization Performance

Question

I\'m building a distributed C++ application that needs to do lots of serialization and deserialization of simple data structures that\'s being passed between different proce

Answer 1

boost.serialization doesn't care about string encodings or endianness. You'll be similarly well off not using it if that matters to you.

You might want to look into ICE from ZeroC: http://www.zeroc.com/

It works similar to CORBA, except that it's entirely specced and defined by the company. The upside is that the implementations work as intended, since there aren't all that many. The downside is that if you're using a language they don't support, you're out of luck.

Answer 2

ACE and ACE TAO come to mind, but you might not like the size and scope of it. http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html

Regarding your query about "fast" and boost. That is a subjective term and without knowing your requirements (throughput, etc) it is difficult to answer that for you. Not that I have any benchmarks for the boost stuff myself...

There are messaging layers you can use, but those are probably slower than boost. I'd say that you identified a good solution in boost, but I've only used ACE and other proprietary communications/messaging products.

Answer 3

Also check out ONC-RPC (old SUN-RPC)

Answer 4

If you are only sending well defined defined data structures, then perhaps you should be looking at ASN.1 as an encoding methodology ?

Answer 5

There's also Thrift, which looks like an alpha project but is used and developed by Facebook, so it has a few users of it.

Or good old DCE, which was the standard MS decided to use for COM. Its now open-source, 20 years too late, but better than never.

Answer 6

Don't pre-emptively optimize. Measure first and optimize second.