algebra VS rkyv

Love seeing the work on modes! There's definitely a use for this in cryptography, where you might want to serialize things containing elliptic curve points, which can be serialized in both "compressed" form and "uncompressed" form. We make extensive use of this in our serialization framework in arkworks: https://github.com/arkworks-rs/algebra/tree/master/serialize

Rust takes the cake in the blockchain space: Substrate, Cosmos (CosmWasm), and Solana. All of the zero knowledge cryptography libraries used for layer 2 solutions are written in Rust, compiling to Wasm (see arkworks, Risc0). Ethereum's next version of smart contracts will even use a restricted subset of Wasm ("Ewasm") instead of EVM.

Is ark a prefix Embark is using for all their Rust crates, or is it a one-off name for your future crate? If so, it might collide with our naming convention in the arkworks ecosystem: arkworks.rs

You can take a look at our approach in the arkworks library: https://github.com/arkworks-rs/algebra/blob/920070c60d481a29fb3c262ef9579f34cbb053a6/ff/src/fields/macros.rs#L103

And before you ask: This only provides partial zero-copy support in strings and byte arrays like serde. But it's not like rkyv which constructs validated references into the data.

Regarding JSON, what kind of other implementation do you have in mind? I've seen e.g. `rkyv` which looks really neat (https://github.com/rkyv/rkyv/issues/85). So far `serde_json` is providing a clean surface API but maybe there's best solution?

Thank you for your concern. I've done plenty of projects that go beyond a "Hello World" such as a GPU accelerated password cracker. I am starting soon a C++/Rust job. I already contributed to codebases I didn't write.

rkyv is awesome because it supports full zero-copy deserialization. You can serialize your HashMap to a file. Later you can directly use the HashMap from the file without creating and populating a new HashMap in memory (rkyv directly indexes into the raw bytes). For even faster access times you can even mmap the file.

I had the same problem when trying to deserialize a big struct with rkyv: see rkyv#277.

Any chance of working with zero-copy deserialization frameworks? like https://github.com/rkyv/rkyv or capnproto

Hi, you seem to know a bit about Sanakirja!

It stores 4kb blobs, right? Does Pijul first parses the data (copying it to other allocations), or uses the data as is? I mean, there are some libraries like cap'n'proto[0] and rkyv[1] that can directly use the file contents as an in-memory data structure, I was wondering if Pijul did anything like that.

I mean, is this btree page [2] stored exactly like this on disk, and does Pijul exploits that to avoid further copying data?

(I guess there's a trouble with compression there: to decompress you really need to write in another buffer)

Also, is the I/O done with something that prevent userspace copies like mmap or io_uring, or does it eventually calls read() to copy the data to its own buffer?

I want to build something like Sanakirja, but with those features, so I'm wondering if there's any overlap.

[0] https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto-rust

[1] https://github.com/rkyv/rkyv

[2] https://docs.rs/sanakirja-core/latest/sanakirja_core/btree/p...

I think https://github.com/rkyv/rkyv does this. Also capnproto like was mentioned here, and perhaps https://docs.rs/zerocopy/0.6.1/zerocopy/index.html too

It's been two months since the last major rkyv release, and three months since the last major feature release. After all that time, I'm proud to announce that rkyv 0.7 is finally out!

After roughly two months of work, rkyv 0.5 is finally out!