rust_serialization_benchmark VS bincode

https://github.com/djkoloski/rust_serialization_benchmark

Apache/arrow-rs: https://github.com/apache/arrow-rs

From https://arrow.apache.org/faq/ :

> How does Arrow relate to Flatbuffers?

> Flatbuffers is a low-level building block for binary data serialization. It is not adapted to the representation of large, structured, homogenous data, and does not sit at the right abstraction layer for data analysis tasks.

> Arrow is a data layer aimed directly at the needs of data analysis, providing a comprehensive collection of data types required to analytics, built-in support for “null” values (representing missing data), and an expanding toolbox of I/O and computing facilities.

> The Arrow file format does use Flatbuffers under the hood to serialize schemas and other metadata needed to implement the Arrow binary IPC protocol, but the Arrow data format uses its own representation for optimal access and computation

Nice that comfy gets even easier. Also, if serde's compile time is an issue, then there's nanoserde which is usually much much faster according to benchmarks

A note on performance and size: Some benchmarks and statistics are included in the README. But only because people will be curious. I've based my methodology on rust_serialization_benchmark, but decided to not extend it (for now) since it seems to exclude any Rust types which are not widely supported by all formats being tested (like HashMap's and 128-bit numbers). The test suite is already quite nice if you want to take it for a spin.

While we haven't benchmarked either of those ourselves. You can checkout rust_serialization_benchmark which has protobuf under the name prost.

Update: Benchmark PR submitted: https://github.com/djkoloski/rust_serialization_benchmark/pull/37

Here is a speed and size benchmark of different rust binary serialization formats: https://github.com/djkoloski/rust_serialization_benchmark Warning: I think the creator of this benchmark is also the creator of rkyv, one of the best positioned formats in the benchmark.

So I assume you're deserializing them before processing the book? If so then if you want an easy speed-up you could also take a look at these benchmarks and pick a faster serialization crate. (: (Although you might or might not get a big speedup; depends on what exactly you're deserializing and how much you are deserializing.)

You can add the rust serialization benchmark to that list

Hey! Similar to bincode, it provides a very similar, compact binary format. The rkyv benchmark is the most comprehensive I'm aware of, but compared to bincode, postcard is generally a similar speed for serialization or deserialization (maybe a touch slower), but generally produces a slightly smaller "on the wire" size.

You should add your crate to these benchmarks. (Which are, AFAIK, the most comprehensive set of benchmarks currently available for Rust serialization libraries.)

Ermm... actually I meant something like this: playground, but then I realized it's basically (de)serialization, and I just found that we already have a crate for that: bincode.

One, figure out the bincode format (documented here: https://github.com/bincode-org/bincode/blob/trunk/docs/spec.md) and write your own parser. Maybe a one-off that specifically only handles this one data structure would be fairly straightforward.

Step 1: The Deserialize type requests data from the Deserializer with one of the deserialize_type methods. This gives it an opportunity to provide certain metadata about the type: structs provide a list of fields, enums provide a list of variants, tuples provide a length, etc. Some data formats (notably bincode) require this metadata to drive deserializing, as the wire format is not self-describing. Crucially, the Deserialize type also provides a visitor that is capable of receiving the requested data from the Deserializer.

Alternatively, give Bincode a try.

Like separate instructions? I was thinking if a instruction have unknown length I make sure I have some kind of header field that tells the data length of the instruction so receiver knows when next instruction starts. And I was planning on using Bincode with serde to serialize and dezerialize like structs and stuff.

Isn't this essentially bincode?

This is similar in practice to using abi_stable, and end-users will still receive compiled files, but your plugins will be sandboxed and a single build will work on all platforms. The downside is that it's a bit more work because WebAssembly's support for passing complex data types between the host and the WebAssembly code is in the preliminary stages, so you need to do something like using Serde to encode your data into something like Bincode or MessagePack (or JSON and friends) to hand it off between the host and the plugin.

What kind of access do you need to the data ? You should be able to make a safe api to the Vec class by iterating on in in chunks, and using a closure to translate data between u8 and other representations. ( f32, u32 has the fomr_ne_bytes() / to_ne_bytes() methods ) You could make a helper function that takes a format description ( i.e. "fffuucc" , and calculates the size of the chunk, and generates a closure for reading accessing the data, of the layout is completely dynamic. This closure could use an enum to wrap the different primitive types. ) Or if the layouts are known at compile time , you could use procedural macros to generate code for serializaion / deserialization inot the the [u8] , though https://crates.io/crates/bincode may already do that for you )

Apparently there's a lot of discussion going on about that (3 of the 4 open tickets on the bincode implementation are about it), for example this one.