JSON Serialization

[dylanjaide]

We would like to be able to transfer hist objects using an API (use case: LHCb Analysis Productions), which will require conversion to JSON and back. If I understand correctly, there isn't yet a standardised way of doing this for hist histograms. If not, is this something that could be added?

[henryiii]

We've been thinking about this for a while, but haven't worked on a standard API yet. It would be nice to define a standard format that multiple packages could use, and ideally would be supported by Boost.Histogram as well as boost-histogram (possibly as an optional component). We could even document it in UHI, for example.

I can work on this after December 8 or so. CC @HDembinski and @jpivarski, thoughts? Can we start working on a draft?

[eduardo-rodrigues]

Hi all. To put more weight/interest in this: Hist, boost-histogram and others are now dependencies for the LHCb offline analysis stack and in particular analysis productions in this instance, which is the centralised framework with which we create ntuples to users on skimmed and trimmed data. The framework is part of Run-3 preparations but is already in use with legacy (Runs 1 and 2) data :-).