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: anytype, comptime T: type, value: T) StreamError!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: anytype, comptime T: type) (StreamError || 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: anytype, comptime T: type, allocator: std.mem.Allocator) (StreamError || 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.