Introduction

Primary design goals:

1. Arbitrary protocol specification
2. No separation of specification information
3. No duplication of specification information

Secondary design goals:

1. Portability - code must compile on any C++11 compliant compiler; platform/library specific code must provide alternatives
2. Code economy - trivial methods (operators, constructors, print methods, ...) should not require object-specific implementations
3. Code efficiency - it should be possible to override the default behaviour of arbitrarily specific combinations of operators
4. Zero overhead - the abstractions used here should introduce no intrinsic overhead over an equivalent operation on a raw C structure

Existing implementations:

• Boost.Serialization - fails primary goals 2 and 3, arguably fails 1
• Google Protocol Buffers - fails primary goal 1