Minimal binary serialization library with focus on performance

NOTE: This library supports additional state threaded through the serialization monad. The same could be achieved by using monad transformer at the cost of some performance penalty.

persist is a reasonably fast binary serialization library operating on strict ByteStrings with small dependency footprint. The binary format uses the little endian representation on both big- and little endian machines. The API design is mostly compatible with the cereal library. However the binary format is not compatible with binary and cereal. Its internal machinery for deserialization is based on the store library. Serialization generates ByteStrings directly instead of relying on the ByteString Builder.

Comparison with other libraries

• flat - bit packing (!), fast, longer compile times
• store - faster serialization, machine dependent, larger library, many dependencies
• cereal - similar to persist, slower
• binary - lazy and slower than persist

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are available at https://github.com/haskell-perf/serialization. The following serialization and deserialization results were measured on GHC 8.6.2. Results that are within 30% of the best result are displayed in bold.

deserialization (time)/BinTree Direction (best first)

deserialization (time)/BinTree Int (best first)

deserialization (time)/Cars (best first)

deserialization (time)/Iris (best first)

deserialization (time)/[Direction] (best first)

serialization (time)/BinTree Direction (best first)

serialization (time)/BinTree Int (best first)

serialization (time)/Cars (best first)

serialization (time)/Iris (best first)

serialization (time)/[Direction] (best first)