4 ms·

BTW: There's a super-fast approach to serialization involving pointer twiddling: you save the raw memory, and when you load it back, just adjust the pointers fo

by 10ren 16y ago

BTW: There's a super-fast approach to serialization involving pointer twiddling: you save the raw memory, and when you load it back, just adjust the pointers for its new location (heard from Andy Hunt). This doesn't help you if you want to serialize in order to inspect the serialized form; and it throws away Java's lispy symbolic bindings; and it would have to be implemented within the JVM - but it is fast.

headius 16y ago
That's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to see out of the JVM's default serialization. As it stands I think I'm going to basically have to define a custom marshaling format and hand-serialize everything for the domain I'm interested in (which, btw, is serializing pre-parsed Ruby code to disk so it can be loaded later without parse time...done to avoid the slowness of our parser during the cold first seconds of the JVM!).
- 10ren 16y ago
  Writing a de/serializer is pretty straightforward, the only slightly tricky bit is handling graphs (you record each object, associated with a label; when you encounter it again, you serialize a ref symbol to its label). It sounds like a whole project, but it's only for your specific use, it wouldn't be that much work, and definitely be worth it. But hand-serializing everything is a serious grind. Would you use a code generator (or use BCEL or similar) for the default case? I bet the vast majority of cases are automatable, and for the other cases it's a starting point. For cold start, I personally like the idea of reusing a JVM. It would be nice if it just had a reset or clear button. :-) BTW: Even though serialization is just a tiny part of your project, you are right on top of it - I'm a little awed. Thanks for this discussion, you helped inspire me to write my first Ruby program tonight (a regular expression engine) - it felt much lighter-weight than Java (but it's a bit difficult to judge, because it's a problem I'd previously worked out how to implement in Java).

by 10ren 16y ago

headius 16y ago

That's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to see out of the JVM's default serialization. As it stands I think I'm going to basically have to define a custom marshaling format and hand-serialize everything for the domain I'm interested in (which, btw, is serializing pre-parsed Ruby code to disk so it can be loaded later without parse time...done to avoid the slowness of our parser during the cold first seconds of the JVM!).

10ren 16y ago
Writing a de/serializer is pretty straightforward, the only slightly tricky bit is handling graphs (you record each object, associated with a label; when you encounter it again, you serialize a ref symbol to its label). It sounds like a whole project, but it's only for your specific use, it wouldn't be that much work, and definitely be worth it. But hand-serializing everything is a serious grind. Would you use a code generator (or use BCEL or similar) for the default case? I bet the vast majority of cases are automatable, and for the other cases it's a starting point. For cold start, I personally like the idea of reusing a JVM. It would be nice if it just had a reset or clear button. :-) BTW: Even though serialization is just a tiny part of your project, you are right on top of it - I'm a little awed. Thanks for this discussion, you helped inspire me to write my first Ruby program tonight (a regular expression engine) - it felt much lighter-weight than Java (but it's a bit difficult to judge, because it's a problem I'd previously worked out how to implement in Java).