I've done that, but it can be very error prone and therefore time consuming. Instead of relying on serialization of existing data structures I actually try to

I've done that, but it can be very error prone and therefore time consuming. Instead of relying on serialization of existing data structures I actually try to use more general data structures that already exist in a single span of memory. Then serialization is just a matter of writing them out from start to finish, or allocating them in a memory mapped file.