Quickly Loading Things From Disk
Loading things from disk is a surprisingly unsolved problem in C++. If you have a class that you want to save to JSON or binary and load back later, you’ll probably end up writing custum parsing code. Solutions like Protobuf or Flatbuffers generate custom classes that are… how should I put it… bad code. They force you to work in a parallel type system that’s not quite as powerful as C++ and that doesn’t allow you to write custom member functions. You pretty much have to wrap anything that they generate. Boost serialization is a better solution in that it allows you to load and save existing classes, which allows you to keep your code quality higher, but it’s unable to write human readable files. The default implementation that it provides is also surprisingly slow. I blame it on the fact that it loads using std::istream.
Based on frustrations with existing solutions I decided to write something that can
- read and write existing, non-POD classes. No custom build step should be required
- write human readable formats like JSON
- read data very quickly (I care less about how fast it writes stuff. I work in an environment where there is a separate compile step for all data)
I came up with something that is faster than any of the libraries mentioned above.
