Windows to iPhone binary files

Is it safe to pass binary files from Windows to iPhone that are written like:

std::ostream stream = // get it somehow
stream.write(&MyHugePODStruct, sizeof(MyHugePODStruct));

and read like:

std::istream stream = // get it somehow
stream.read(&MyHugePODStruct, sizeof(MyHugePODStruct));

While the definition of MyHugePODStruct is the same? if not is there any way to serialize this with e开发者_C百科ither standard library (c++11 included) or boost safely? is there more clean way to this, because it seems like a non portable piece of code?

No, for many reasons. First off, this won't compile, because you have to pass a char * to read and write. Secondly, this isn't guaranteed to work on even one single platform, because the structure may contain padding (but that itself may differ between different among differently compiled versions of the code, even on the same platform). Next, there are 64/32-bit issues to consider which affect many of the primitive types (e.g. long double is padded to 12 bytes on x86, but to 16 bytes on x64). Last but not least there's endianness (though I'm not sure what the iOS endianness is).

So in short, no, don't do that.

You have to serialize each struct member separately, and according to its data type.

You might like to check out Boost.serialization, though I have no experience with it.