std.serialization

[Orvid King]

Well, I wrote the code for this a while back, and although it was 
originally intended as a replacement for just std.json (thus the 
repo name), it does have the framework in place to be a 
generalized serialization framework, and there is the start of 
xml, and bson implementations, so I'm releasing it as 
std.serialization. The JSON implementation is the only one I'd 
consider ready for production use however. The (de)serialization 
framework takes a step back and asks, "Why do we need pull 
parsers?", the answer to which is that allocations are slow, so 
don't allocate. And that's exactly what I do. The serializer does 
absolutely *no* allocations of it's own (except for float->string 
conversion, which I don't understand the algorithms enough to 
implement myself) even going so far as to create an output range 
based version of to!string(int/uint/long/ulong/etc.). And the 
benefits of doing it this way are very clearly reflected in the 
pure speed of the serializer. On my 2ghz i5 Macbook Air, it takes 
50ms to serialize 100k objects with roughly 600k integers 
contained in them when compiled with DMD, this roughly half the 
time it takes to generate the data to serialize. Compile it with 
GDC or LDC and that time is cut in half. I have done the exact 
same thing with deserialization as well, the only allocations 
done are for the output objects, because there is no intermediate 
representation.

So how do I use this greatness? Simple! import std.serialization, 
and apply the @serializable UDA to the class/struct you want to 
serialize, then call toJOSN(yourObject) and 
fromJSON!YourType(yourString) to your heart's content!

Now, there are other serialization libraries out there, such as 
orange, that take the compile-time reflection approach, but the 
amount of code required to implement a single format is just 
massive 2100 lines for the XMLArchive. The entire JSON 
(de)serialization, which *includes* both the lexer and parser is 
only 900 lines.




Wow, that went a bit more towards a salesman-like description 
than I as aiming for, so I'll just end this here and give you the 
link, before this ends up looking like a massive, badly written, 
sales pitch :D

https://github.com/Orvid/JSONSerialization