Embedded Programming with Modern C++ Cookbook

How it works...

In our test application, we defined a data type to represent paths from a source point to multiple destination points. We intentionally used hierarchical structures scattered in memory to demonstrate how to approach this problem in a generic way.

If we do not have specific requirements for performance, one of the possible approaches to serialization is storing data in text format. Besides its simplicity, it has two major advantages: 

• Text encoding automatically resolves all issues related to endianness, alignment, and the size of integer data types.
• It is readable by humans. Developers can use serialized data for debugging without any additional tools.

To work with text representation, we can use the input and output streams ...