jvm-serializers VS MessagePack for C# (.NET, .NET Core, Unity, Xamarin)

Compared with protobuf, fury is 3.2x faster. When comparing with avro, fury is 5.3x faster. Compared with flatbuffers, fury is 4.8x faster. See https://github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/wiki for detailed benchmark data

First, there's benchmarks here if you haven't seen it: jvm-serializers. Not terribly scientific, but it's something. To make any decision, you really need to benchmark your own object graph and it's important to configure the serializer for your particular usage. Still, it is sort of useful for comparing frameworks. It would be interesting to see how Loial performs there. Ping me if you add it.

It depends. Some binary encodings such as flatbuffer are actually slower than some JSON libraries. There's a wide range of performance even in the JSON libraries themselves. Generally the faster JSON libraries are the ones that work on a predefined schema and so are able to generate code specifically for that JSON.

> I'm surprised this is up for debate.

I looked into logging in protobuf when I was seeing if there was a better binary encoding for ring-buffer logging, along the same lines as nanolog:

https://tersesystems.com/blog/2020/11/26/queryable-logging-w...

What I found was that it's typically not the binary encoding vs string encoding that makes a difference. The biggest factors are "is there a predefined schema", "is there a precompiler that will generate code for this schema", and "what is the complexity of the output format". With that in mind, if you are dealing with chaotic semi-structured data, JSON is pretty good, and actually faster than some binary encodings:

https://github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/wiki/Newer-Results...

You could use any of the JVM serialisers which should still work.

Given it's a binary serialization framework, it should not be too difficult, because the domain is well-explored and numerous libraries exist in C# which address same goals that Fury does.

More popular/newer examples are https://github.com/Cysharp/MemoryPack (which is similar to Fury with its own spec, C#-code first schema), https://github.com/MessagePack-CSharp/MessagePack-CSharp or even gRPC / Protobuf tooling https://github.com/grpc/grpc-dotnet

With Unity/IL2CPP stuff: For general-purpose serialization libraries like JSON, you sometimes need to provide hints to make sure types are included: https://github.com/jilleJr/Newtonsoft.Json-for-Unity/wiki/Fi...

For schema serialization on known types, there are codegen tools (i.e. moc for MessagePack): https://github.com/neuecc/MessagePack-CSharp

MessagePack is migrating to Rosalyn code generators, so basically invisible codegen. Cysharp's newer serialization library, MessagePack, already uses this: https://github.com/Cysharp/MemoryPack

Thanks, I'm sure I'll need it, though I do have my own platform with serialization set up already that I'm hoping I can port relatively easily (It's backended with MessagePack C# which is a lovely serializer for Unity.)

In the Road map of features #119 for MessagePack-CSharp, they checked the box for:

Try MessagePack for serialization. It will help to reduce the size of the message and the time of serialization.

I mentioned JSON, but there are many formats that are much more efficient. I can mention FlatBuffers, MessagePack and ProtoBuf. These are the ones I've used myself, and personally I'm most comfortable with MessagePack and ProtoBuf. I don't think the performance would be an issue if you had to choose between these three, it's mostly the API that is different.

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