Request for review - std.serialization (orange)

[Francois Chabot]

On Tuesday, 2 April 2013 at 18:50:04 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> It probably makes sense if one sends the data over the network 
> and the data is mostly value based. I usually have an object 
> hierarchy with many reference types and objects passed around.

I think that's kinda the sticking point with Orange for me. 
Integrating it in my current project implied bringing in a huge 
amount of code when my needs are super-straightforward.

I actually ended up writing myself a super-light range-based 
serializer that'll handle any combination of struct/Array/AA 
thrown at it. (for reference: 
https://github.com/Chabsf/flyb/blob/SerializableHistory/serialize.d 
). It also does not copy data around, and instead just casts the 
data as arrays of bytes. It's under 300 lines of D code and does 
everything I need from Orange, and does it very fast. Orange is 
just so very overkill for my needs.

My point is that serializing POD-based structures in D is so 
simple that using a one-size-fit-all serializer made to handle 
absolutely everything feels very wasteful.