struct to stream | stream to struct

A Zig binary serialization format and library.

Features

• Convert (nearly) any Zig runtime datatype to binary data and back.
• Computes a stream signature that prevents deserialization of invalid data.
• No support for graph like structures. Everything is considered to be tree data.

Unsupported types:

• All comptime only types
• Unbound pointers (c pointers, pointer to many)
• volatile pointers
• Untagged or external unions
• Opaque types
• Function pointers
• Frames

API

The library itself provides only some APIs, as most of the serialization process is not configurable.

/// Serializes the given `value: T` into the `stream`.
/// - `stream` is a instance of `std.Io.Writer`
/// - `T` is the type to serialize
/// - `value` is the instance to serialize.
fn serialize(stream: *std.Io.Writer, comptime T: type, value: T) std.Io.Writer.Error!void;

/// Deserializes a value of type `T` from the `stream`.
/// - `stream` is a instance of `std.Io.Reader`
/// - `T` is the type to deserialize
fn deserialize(stream: *std.Io.Reader, comptime T: type) (std.Io.Reader.Error || error{UnexpectedData,EndOfStream})!T;

/// Deserializes a value of type `T` from the `stream`.
/// - `stream` is a instance of `std.Io.Reader`
/// - `T` is the type to deserialize
/// - `allocator` is an allocator require to allocate slices and pointers.
/// Result must be freed by using `free()`.
fn deserializeAlloc(stream: *std.Io.Reader, comptime T: type, allocator: std.mem.Allocator) (std.Io.Reader.Error || error{ UnexpectedData, OutOfMemory,EndOfStream })!T;

/// Releases all memory allocated by `deserializeAlloc`.
/// - `allocator` is the allocator passed to `deserializeAlloc`.
/// - `T` is the type that was passed to `deserializeAlloc`.
/// - `value` is the value that was returned by `deserializeAlloc`.
fn free(allocator: std.mem.Allocator, comptime T: type, value: T) void;

Usage and Development

Adding the library

Just add the s2s.zig as a package to your Zig project. It has no external dependencies.

Running the test suite

[user@host s2s]$ zig test s2s.zig
All 3 tests passed.
[user@host s2s]$

Project Status

Most of the serialization/deserialization is implemented for the trivial case.

Pointers/slices with non-standard alignment aren't properly supported yet.