A high performance polymorphic serializer for the .NET framework.¨
Wire was designed to safely transfer messages in distributed systems, for example service bus or actor model based systems. In message based systems, it is common to receive different types of messages and apply pattern matching over those messages. If the messages does not carry over all the relevant type information to the receiveing side, the message might no longer match exactly what your system expect.
Consilder the following case:
public class Envelope
{
//untyped property
public object Payload {get;set;}
//other properties..
...
}
...
var envelope = new Envelope { Payload = (float)1.2 };If you for example are using a Json based serializer, it is very likely that the value 1.2 will be deserialized as a double as Json has no way to describe the type of the decimal value.
While if you use some sort of binary serializer like Google Protobuf, all messages needs to be designed with a strict contract up front.
Wire solves this by encoding a manifest for each value - a single byte prefix for primitive values, and fully qualified assembly names for complex types.
Sometimes, you might have objects that simply can't be serialized in a safe way, the object might be contextual in some way. Wire can solve those problems using "Surrogates", surrogates are a way to translate an object from and back to the context bound representation.
var surrogate = Surrogate.Create<IMyContextualInterface,IMySurrogate>(original => original.ToSurrogate(), surrogate => surrogate.Restore(someContext));
var options = new SerializerOptions(surrogates: new [] { surrogate });
var serializer = new Serializer(options);This is essential for frameworks like Akka.NET where we need to be able to resolve live Actor References in the deserializing system.
Wire has been designed to work in multiple modes in terms of version tolerance vs. performance.
- Pre Register Types, when using "Pre registered types", Wire will only emit a type ID in the output stream. This results in the best performance, but is also fragile if different clients have different versions of the contract types.
- Non Versioned, this is largely the same as the above, but the serializer does not need to know about your types up front. it will embed the fully qualified typename in the outputstream. this results in a larger payload and some performance overhead.
- Versioned, in this mode, Wire will emit both type names and field information in the output stream. This allows systems to have slightly different versions of the contract types where some fields may have been added or removed.
Wire has been designed as a wire format, point to point for soft realtime scenarios. If you need a format that is durable for persistence over time. e.g. EventSourcing or for message queues, then Protobuf or MS Bond is probably a better choise as those formats have been designed for true versiom tolerance.
Wire has been designed with a performance first mindset. It is not the most important aspect of Wire, Surrogates and polymorphism is more critical for what we want to solve. But even with it's rich featureset, Wire performs extremely well.
Wire - preregister types
Serialize 312 ms
Deserialize 261 ms
Size 38 bytes
Total 573 ms
Wire - no version data
Serialize 327 ms
Deserialize 354 ms
Size 73 bytes
Total 681 ms
Wire - preserve object refs
Serialize 400 ms
Deserialize 369 ms
Size 73 bytes
Total 769 ms
MS Bond
Serialize 429 ms
Deserialize 404 ms
Size 50 bytes
Total 833 ms
Wire - version tolerant
Serialize 423 ms
Deserialize 674 ms
Size 195 bytes
Total 1097 ms
Protobuf.NET
Serialize 638 ms
Deserialize 721 ms
Size 42 bytes
Total 1359 ms
Jil
Serialize 1448 ms
Deserialize 714 ms
Size 123 bytes
Total 2162 ms
Net Serializer
Serialize 1289 ms
Deserialize 1113 ms
Size 39 bytes
Total 2402 ms
Json.NET
Serialize 3767 ms
Deserialize 5936 ms
Size 187 bytes
Total 9703 ms
Binary formatter
Serialize 10784 ms
Deserialize 11374 ms
Size 362 bytes
Total 22158 ms
This test was run using the following object definition:
public class Poco
{
public string StringProp { get; set; } //using the text "hello"
public int IntProp { get; set; } //123
public Guid GuidProp { get; set; } //Guid.NewGuid()
public DateTime DateProp { get; set; } //DateTime.Now
}
Big disclaimer: The above results change drastically depending on your contracts, e.g. using smaller messages favor both NetSerializer and Jil. There is no "best" or "fastest" serializer, it all depends on context and requirements.