[swift-evolution] [Proposal] Foundation Swift Archival & Serialization

[Kenny Leung]

Hi All.

Forgive me if I missed it - I haven’t read the proposal in full detail - but it seems to make no mention of archiving graphs with circular references. Is this implicitly supported, or explicitly unsupported?

While we’re at it, my only real exposure to archiving is through Foundation, so I’d like to know how everybody else understands these terms:

serialization - the process of “flattening” out an object graph into a serial stream of objects

encoding - the process of converting internal object data into an external format

archiving - the whole enchilada of serialization + encoding

Thanks!

-Kenny