reflecxx VS binary_io

I haven't used the cmake_find_package generator much myself. People like it because it lets you write your cmake in a mostly conan agnostic way. If you don't care about that, I find the plain cmake generator much easier to use. You can inspect the generated conanbuildinfo.cmake file to see the targets, and call conan_basic_setup(TARGETS ). Then you link against targets that look like CONAN_PKG::boost or similar. I usually wrap conan setup in a cmake utility file like this: https://github.com/jimmyorourke/reflecxx/blob/main/test/cmake/ConanSetup.cmake

I have a library and tooling that using code generation will allow you to automatically generate serialization/deserialization to your custom binary format. It uses the visitor pattern and code generation for static reflection (eg iterating over fields of a struct). Check it out at https://github.com/jimmyorourke/reflecxx. Particularly it includes an automatic to/from json, which you could use as a starting point for how to write your own visitor.

You might be interested in a project I've put together that uses libclang to generate static reflection metadata that can then be used for generic parsing or serialization: https://github.com/jimmyorourke/reflecxx. It has examples of automatic to/from json.

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.