From Code Synthesis Wiki

The C++/Tree Mapping User Manual has a section about binary serialization.

Contents 1 Predefined binary formats 1.1 CDR (Common Data Representation) 1.2 XDR (eXternal Data Representation) 2 Custom binary formats 2.1 Boost serialization library 2.2 QDataStream 3 Comparison of the binary formats

Predefined binary formats

CDR (Common Data Representation)

The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) provides a binary format. The extraction and insertion classes are described in the doxygen generated documentation.

• ACE_OutputCDR Class Reference
• ACE_InputCDR Class Reference

There is an example of using CDR in examples/cxx/tree/binary/cdr

XDR (eXternal Data Representation)

Wikipedia entry

There is an example of using XDR in examples/cxx/tree/binary/xdr

Custom binary formats

Boost serialization library

The Boost C++ libraries provides a serialization library.

There is an example of using Boost serialization in examples/cxx/tree/binary/boost

QDataStream

QDataStream is a serialization class from the Qt library. Some experimental code is available that uses QDataStream together with Codesynthesis XSD.

Comparison of the binary formats

Serializing a Codesynthesis XSD data object can yield different file sizes for the different binary formats. The XML Schema datatype int8 takes up 32 bits in the XDR format but only 8 bit in the CDR and the QDataStream format (tested on a Ubuntu Linux 10.10 32-bit computer).