Perl's Storable can also serialize code references which get eval'ed during deserialization, and can also serialize multiple references once, though you have to

Perl's Storable can also serialize code references which get eval'ed during deserialization, and can also serialize multiple references once, though you have to be more explicit about that. And Storable is still 2x-3x faster than the already quite fast JSON::XS. It would seem the bytecode interpreter architecture in Pickle is the limiting factor. If anybody has some good profiling data on Pickle though, I'd love to see it.