Issues in the design of a reflective library for checkpointing C++ objects

Object Persistence is an important feature of Object-oriented languages. The C++ language specification does not include or discuss any method of providing persistence for C++ objects. Several schemes have been developed for adding persistence to C++. Some of them require persistent objects to be allocated and treated differently than non-persistent objects, while some others require the programmer to provide vital parts of the persistence mechanism. It is desirable to make the persistence feature transparent, but the nature of C++ makes it difficult. This paper discusses in detail the various interesting language issues to be considered for adding persistence to C++ and how they lead to the design of the reflective object-checkpointing library, MemberAnalyzer.