binary_io VS Better Enums

I wrote a modern iostreams library a while back that was born out of these exact same frustrations: https://github.com/Ryan-rsm-McKenzie/binary_io

I wrote a library called binary_io, specifically for handling bespoke binary formats

I feel like standard C++ streams are terribly clunky to use, and suck at anything that isn't reading a plain text file encoded in ASCII. So when I saw Modern std::byte stream IO for C++, I got excited that C++ might finally get some powerful abstractions for IO that weren't agonizingly painful to customize/use. However, sadly the author abandoned the paper (and also their github/reddit account). So I went ahead and wrote my own library which was loosely based off of that paper, and uses C++20. The result is a set of generic streams which can be used to implement a binary IO protocol for a wide variety of sources, and which can easily be extended for other sources as well (have you ever tried to write your own std::basic_streambuf?). It's aptly named binary_io.

I really like better_enums instead of magic_enums. There’s no limit on enum size with it: http://aantron.github.io/better-enums/

It was heavily used at a former employer of mine, so definitely a solid production-ready solution.

IIRC I then switched to another library doing the same stuff: https://github.com/aantron/better-enums It is not as magical, as it uses a special macro to define the enum, using dedicated syntax. So it only works for enums you yourself define. However, it did work a lot better for me with enums with huge values.

I can't keep up! First we have better enum, then some guy at a conference says we have to use wise enum instead, and now you speak of magic enum!

If you need a laugh today, look at Better Enums library for C++. If you thought moving from C to C++ would let you leave macros behind, think again! Enums in C++ still suck (a bit less than in C though), so someone built a library to help with that. And it's built on macros. So you can only have 64 entries per enum. And the library's code is barely readable.