Question

Is it possible in C++ to serialize an object by taking a pointer of the first address of the object and increment this pointer till the end of the object is reached?

If it’s possible, how can I find the first memory adress of the object and in which data type should I store the values? And how could I build the object on the other side?

Answer 1

This is relatively easy to do in some very restrictive circumstances (POD with no pointers/references; same OS, CPU architecture and the C++ compiler on both ends of the serialization pipe).

There is a number of issues that complicate matters in the more general case:

1. dealing with classes that have non-trivial constructors/destructors;
2. dealing with pointers/references contained within the object;
3. cycles in the pointer/reference graph;
4. polymorphism;
5. dealing with virtual base classes;
6. endianness;
7. field alignment, padding etc;
8. the width of primitive types (int on one platform isn’t necessarily the same size as int on another);
9. versioning so that new fields can be added without breaking stuff.