XTL – The Externalization Template Library

The Externalization Template Library (XTL) is a set of template classes designed to ease the task of converting C++ data-structures to a language and machine independent external representation, and from this external representation back to C++ data-structures, as required for communication or persistent storage in heterogeneous computer systems. As externalization requires the traversal of data-structures, most existing solutions require a special compiler to generate traversal procedures from simple specifications, restricting which data-structures can be externalized. Those that do not, are either inefficient or require extra effort by the programmer. In contrast, the XTL demonstrates how some features of modern C++ can make the development of traversal procedures for externalization convenient without restricting the programmer to a few data-structures. As the XTL is especially designed for optimizing compilers, the resulting code is also very fast.