Hey guys,

what do you think of including boost serialization support? That way you can simply stream a matrix in and out of a boost::Archive like this

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istream > myRestoredMatrix;

This would only require a few lines of code in MatrixBase. In order to be self-contained, we could make a boost define, which would normally not be set, so we could enable boost serialization support like

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#DEFINE EIGEN_BOOST_SERIALIZE

What do you think? I will add serialization support anyway, but it would become a maintainance headache to customize my Eigen lib. What internal variables would I have to set to restore a matrix representation? The size and the data? Something else, too?

Cheers, Jonas

hi,

FYI, you can add any custom methods to either MatrixBase and/or Matrix without having to modify the respective files:
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/Customiz ... MatrixBase
so no maintainability headache

Now about adding such a feature upstream, why not, but I'd personally prefer to have it in a separate module. For instance this could be an interesting "contrib" module which would contains any kind of support for boost: serialization, conversion from/to ublas objects (I know some people wrote such features), etc.

ggael wrote:hi,

FYI, you can add any custom methods to either MatrixBase and/or Matrix without having to modify the respective files:
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/Customiz ... MatrixBase
so no maintainability headache

Now about adding such a feature upstream, why not, but I'd personally prefer to have it in a separate module. For instance this could be an interesting "contrib" module which would contains any kind of support for boost: serialization, conversion from/to ublas objects (I know some people wrote such features), etc.

Has there be any movement on this? Or should I write my own code

What I meant was if someone write such a "BoostSupport" module, then I'll be ok to add it in Eigen's svn. So far we did not receive anything like that but perhaps captaincurk already has some stuff to share?

ggael wrote:What I meant was if someone write such a "BoostSupport" module, then I'll be ok to add it in Eigen's svn. So far we did not receive anything like that but perhaps captaincurk already has some stuff to share?

hi ggael,

I cannot promise anything. Due to other projects I had to put my Eigen2 related project on ice until today. I am currently reevaluating the architecture and trying to cut the time cost, as I'm on a tight schedule. But if I end up implementing Boost serialization, then I will certainly share it.

Cheers, Jonas