Because serialization is hard
- Be compatible enough with built-in C# Serialization, while still being efficient enough in the CPU, memory and storage size departments
- Serialize most things incl.
ISerializable
- Omit feature I do not need, in particular, surrugates, events
- Serialize most things incl.
- Provide an efficient (enough) binary representation that is still reliable (for persistence)
- Use basic tags (
ElementType
) to mark in a stream what comes next - Provide specialized tags for things like
null
, PODs (including DateTime), enums, different arrays (empty, byte, 1-item, rank-1, PODs, generic objects), etc. - Allow cycles and copies by writing an object only once and writing references to that afterwards
- Avoid duplicate strings
- Tune writing of (
unsigend
) lengths (inspired by websocket frames)- < 254 will use one byte
- <=
ushort.MAXVALUE
will use three bytes (16-bit + one byte for the tag (0xfe
) - Otherwise use 5 bytes (32-bit + one byte for the tag (
0xff
)) - Since most lengths written will be shortish, most will only use 1 byte instead of 4 bytes for an
int
.
- Optimize assembly/type storage a bit (See also
EfficientSerializationBinder.RegisterKnown
)
- Use basic tags (
- Thread-safe, reusable
IFormatter
(allowing to specify theStreamingContext
perSerialize
/Deserialize
call)- Make use of
Concurrent
for global caches
- Make use of
- Be somewhat hackable (e.g. to add new optimized representations without breaking existing serialized representations)
- Be entirely compatible
- Be secure (especially against tempering)
- Be error-resilient/use advanced error detection (against stream errors)
- Be memory efficient in the face of serializing tons of different object types (the caches are unlimited in growth by design)
Very alpha! You have been warned!
Good enough for caching stuff to disk (that is, you can regenerate things at any time)
Do not use this over the network unless you bolt message authentication on top. Or else an attacker will literally delete all your stuff!
Probably not a great idea to use this inter-application, either.
- Optimize list types
- Optimize dict types