nibblecode

Nibblecode is a zero-copy serialization format heavily inspired¹ by rkyv. In many cases, this is faster than rkyv, and has better ergonomics, but it sacrifices some features that you may want:

• No stream serialization (data can only be serialized into a preallocated buffer)

• No support for rust stable (this uses several nightly-only features, some for convenience (like ptr_alignment_type), some for core functionality (like allocator_api))

• I haven't gotten round to implementing all data structures (although they'd only take a few hours to implement)

• No full deserialization (the API is exclusively zero-copy, you'll have to handle conversion yourself, if needed)

Disclaimer

I made this in a week, mostly as a learning experiment, and also to see if I could beat rkyv in their own benchmarks.

This has good performance in the niche of serializing small messages, where storage size/bandwidth isn't a concern. In all other cases, I recommend bitcode, which produces tiny messages, and is also much faster than this for large messages.

Also, the documentation is very incomplete.