reflecxx VS Bitsery

I haven't used the cmake_find_package generator much myself. People like it because it lets you write your cmake in a mostly conan agnostic way. If you don't care about that, I find the plain cmake generator much easier to use. You can inspect the generated conanbuildinfo.cmake file to see the targets, and call conan_basic_setup(TARGETS ). Then you link against targets that look like CONAN_PKG::boost or similar. I usually wrap conan setup in a cmake utility file like this: https://github.com/jimmyorourke/reflecxx/blob/main/test/cmake/ConanSetup.cmake

I have a library and tooling that using code generation will allow you to automatically generate serialization/deserialization to your custom binary format. It uses the visitor pattern and code generation for static reflection (eg iterating over fields of a struct). Check it out at https://github.com/jimmyorourke/reflecxx. Particularly it includes an automatic to/from json, which you could use as a starting point for how to write your own visitor.

You might be interested in a project I've put together that uses libclang to generate static reflection metadata that can then be used for generic parsing or serialization: https://github.com/jimmyorourke/reflecxx. It has examples of automatic to/from json.

Thanks for sharing https://github.com/fraillt/bitsery it seems more powerful but require quite a boilerplate code for even very simple composite stuff. With ByteStream you can totally forget about deep you are in the data-structure hierarchy.

Bitsery is the closest I've seen to it, but you have to use extensions (which i can't yet figure out the API for) to make it achieve byte for byte compatbility

If size and performance matter, then take a look at bitsery. * it might be 9x+ faster than cereal and 18x faster than protobuf. * size-wise, you might save 20-30% by default * on top of that you additional might opt-in into: * bit-level serialization control (e.g. if your values are in the range 1000-2000 it will take you 10bits, or use VLE) * backward-forward compatibility support * pointer support, including raw pointers with the ability to provide custom allocator. * and powerful extensions system, which allows you to further customize things in any way you want it :)

About on par with nlohmann is a binary serialization lib called Bitsery. It's easy to use, and will be a lot more performant than json. The downside is that the serialized data won't be human readable.