archived-cereal/README.md

cereal - A C++11 library for serialization

cereal is a header-only C++11 serialization library inspired by boost. cereal takes arbitrary data types and reversibly turns them into different representations, such as compact binary encodings. cereal was designed to be fast, light-weight, and easy to extend - it has no external dependencies and can be easily bundled with other code or used standalone.

cereal comes with full support for the C++11 standard library

Serialization support for pretty much every type in the standard library comes out of the box with cereal. Since cereal was written to be a minimal, fast library, it does not support serializing raw pointers - smart pointers (things like std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr) are no problem, however.

cereal requires a compliant C++11 compiler

cereal uses features new to C++11 and requires a fairly compliant C++ compiler to work properly. cereal has been confirmed to work on g++ 4.8.1 and clang++ 3.3. It may work on older versions, but there is no emphasis on supporting them. Until VC++ gets more complete C++11 support, it is not supported.

cereal offers a familiar syntax to users of boost

#include <cereal/archives/binary.hpp>
#include <cereal/types/map.hpp>
#include <cereal/types/memory.hpp>

struct MyRecord
{
  uint8_t x, y;
  float z;
  
  template <class Archive>
  void serialize( Archive & ar )
  {
    ar( x, y, z );
  }
};

struct SomeData
{
  int32_t id;
  std::shared_ptr<std::unordered_map<uint32_t, MyRecord>> data;
  
  template <class Archive>
  void save( Archive & ar )
  {
    ar( data );
  }
  
  template <class Archive>
  void load( Archive & ar )
  {
    static int32_t idGen = 0;
    id = idGen++;
    ar( data );
  }
};