Ser20 - A C++20 library for serialization

Ser20 is a C++20 fork of cereal, a C++11 serialization library. It is completely compatible except for a namespace change. Thanks to modern meta-programming, Ser20 is 15% smaller and can compile up to 25% faster. Ser20 also has some other runtime optimizations, and is optimized for debug experience and debug symbols size.

Ser20 requires compiler support for C++20 concepts. It is tested on the following compilers (but ):

Compiler	Version	Platform
GCC	10-14	Ubuntu
Clang	13-18	Ubuntu
MSVC	VS 16, VS 17	Windows
AppleClang	15, 16	macOS

Using Ser20

Installation

The best way to use Ser20 is with CMake. Ser20 is not header-only, which means that a compilation step is necessary to use it. The simplest way to do that is to use Ser20 as a subproject in your CMake project.

Usage

Using Ser20 is pretty simple. Except for a new namespace, it is completely compatible with Ser20 and therefor pretty compatible with boost::serialize as well.

This is a simple usage example:

#include <ser20/types/unordered_map.hpp>
#include <ser20/types/memory.hpp>
#include <ser20/archives/binary.hpp>
#include <fstream>
    
struct MyRecord {
  uint8_t x, y;
  float z;

  template <class Archive> void serialize(Archive& ar) { ar(x, y, z); }
};

struct SomeData {
  int32_t id;
  std::shared_ptr<std::unordered_map<uint32_t, MyRecord>> data;

  template <class Archive> void save(Archive& ar) const { ar(data); }

  template <class Archive> void load(Archive& ar) {
    static int32_t idGen = 0;
    id = idGen++;
    ar(data);
  }
};

int main() {
  std::ofstream os("out.bin", std::ios::binary);
  Ser20::BinaryOutputArchive archive(os);

  SomeData myData;
  archive(myData);

  return 0;
}

Performance

Although it's by far not the fastest serialization library out there, Ser20 is sometimes two times as fast as cereal and boost::serialization in binary serialization:

This difference is mostly due to buffering of small reads and writes to ostreams.

Ser20 has a permissive license

Ser20 is licensed under the BSD license.

Ser20 build status

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