Fwd: Re[2]: Towards better serialization

[Brian Goetz]

> you want to serialize those data.
> You cannot be more decoupled than current serialization as it is purely
> declarative.

Really?

The mechanisms serialization gives you to control serialization are 
readObject, writeObject, readResolve, writeReplace, etc.  Which are all 
purely imperative -- and couple state extraction / reconstruction with 
stream reading and writing.

As a bonus, if you implement readObject (and any class with invariants 
must, or else it is broken), you have to validate the arguments 
explicitly in readObject, and as a bonus, you get to do it in a 
completely different way than you do in the constructor.

Have you never actually used these methods?  If you had, you'd never 
describe serialization as "purely declarative."

>
>> serialization of records is transparent.
> Why only records?
>

Because with records, all the relevant protocols -- such as 
construction, deconstruction, equality, hashing -- are derived from the 
record's declared state description.  Serialization is one of those 
protocols that can be derived from the state description.