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I once worked on a very large commercial application that was based on a home-grown I/O framework which operated on similar principles. It was a complete pain
by seventhson 3y ago
I once worked on a very large commercial application that was based on a home-grown I/O framework which operated on similar principles.
It was a complete pain in the ass. You were constantly future-proofing your data structures because you knew you were going to be stuck with them for all eternity because the I/O framework was going to serialize them verbatim whether you liked it or not. Those were dark days...
- Solvency 3y agoI don't get it. Surely if you ever needed to, you could write an interpreter for loading tbe older files if you decided to abandon this 1:1 representation?
- amomchilov 3y agoI think the effort involved disincentivizes against it, and nudges people towards defensively adding spare fields or whatever. The other comment pointed out that you can make a fall back migration code path that migrates over older file versions. That's the escape hatch if you have no other options
- dragontamer 3y agoYou ever hear of .doc files? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_formats/ms-doc/ccd7b486-7881-484c-a137-51170af7cc22 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_form... Yeah. There is a reason XML was seen as the future back in the 90s. Custom databases often get extended into custom filesystems. And these systems on top of systems get obscure features (like embedding excel sheets inside of Word) and... Thing get hairy.