This is generally a fine practice: Putting implementations in headers
makes them harder to read and slows compilation. Unfortunately it is
necessary for templates, but we can ameliorate that by putting them in a
separate header. Only files which need to instantiate those templates
will need to include the header with the implementation; the rest can
just include the declaration.
This is now documenting in the contributing guide.
Also, it just happens that these polymorphic serializers are the
protocol agnostic ones. (Worker and serve protocol have the same logic
for these container types.) This means by doing this general template
cleanup, we are also getting a head start on better indicating which
code is protocol-specific and which code is shared between protocols.
This is the more typically way to do [Argument-dependent
lookup](https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/adl)-leveraging
generic serializers in C++. It makes the relationship between the `read`
and `write` methods more clear and rigorous, and also looks more
familiar to users coming from other languages that do not have C++'s
libertine ad-hoc overloading.
I am returning to this because during the review in
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/6223, it came up as something that
would make the code easier to read --- easier today hopefully already,
but definitely easier if we were have multiple codified protocols with
code sharing between them as that PR seeks to accomplish.
If I recall correctly, the main criticism of this the first time around
(in 2020) was that having to specify the type when writing, e.g.
`WorkerProto<MyType>::write`, was too verbose and cumbersome. This is
now addressed with the `workerProtoWrite` wrapper function.
This method is also the way `nlohmann::json`, which we have used for a
number of years now, does its serializers, for what its worth.
This reverts commit 45a0ed82f0. That
commit in turn reverted 9ab07e99f5.
These items are not templates, and they declared in
`worker-protocol.hh`; therefore they should live in a
`worker-protocol.cc`.
Anything else needlessly diverges from convention. After all, it is not
like this code is only used in `remote-store.cc`; it is also used in
`daemon.cc`. There is no good reason to place it with the client
implementation or the server implementation when it used equally by
both.
