From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2003-06-18T14:30:09+09:00
Subject: Stability of Marshaling format

Hi,

I've been working on a new networked application in Ruby that heavily uses
Ruby's internal Marshaling for inter-node communication. I'd like to
better understand the issues involved in that design decision and would
like your input.

Basically my question is:
 How stable can one expect the marshaling format itself to be?

The risc with my application is that a future version of the system uses a
new/later Ruby version. If the latter uses a different Marshaling
format old installments of the app might not be able to communicate
with newer versions.

Ok, I hear you scream YAML/Syck and/or XML already but I don't feel it
should be needed here where readability is not a requirement, marshaling
is very fast and compact (ok, ok "premature optimization"...), and its
easier since Marshal is in core Ruby (ok, ok both yaml and rexml now in
the core install).

One interesting "data point" would be to know if/when/how the marshal
format has changed in the past. Have it been changed so that older
marshaled object couldn't be read back? What is the likelihood of that
happening again? Matz?

Regards,

Robert Feldt