Talk:Object serialization

Serializing object instances which have no state does not seem very meaningful. You could trivially satisfy this task in some languages merely by naming the objects.

Meanwhile, when I think about this issue, a variety of possibilities occur to me, for state. We could even introduce stateful classes and then [by implication] the classes would also need to be serialized -- but I do not think most of the examples do anything like this.

Can we update this task with a little bit of state? Perhaps, we can add a method which reports the time the object was first created? Or would that break all the existing implementations and thus be a bad idea?

Rdm 20:25, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Try serializing an object graph; the inter-object links would be a reasonable piece of state. Or you could use the labels on the nodes as the state. I'd keep the construction short though; this is a serialization task, not a "build a graph" task after all. —Donal Fellows 05:38, 3 September 2009 (UTC)