Encoding and serialization

It's an extremely common need to convert data from one format to another. In Haskell, we often like working with Haskell values, because of guarantees of strong-typing and the expressivity of algebraic datatypes, though data must then be converted to and from Haskell values. Conversions should also be fast, because there could be a lot of data.

There are a lot of data formats for different use cases: binary serialization to disk for local storage, efficiently packed formats for transmission over network and formats for interfacing with other applications, even users, in APIs and the like. Next, we'll glance at some of the widely used binary and text serialization libraries.

Binary serialization of Haskell values

The libraries in this subsection are as follows:

• binary, cereal: Serialization using lazy ByteStrings using automatic or custom binary formats

• store: An even more direct and efficient serialization library from FPComplete

Efficiently serializing Haskell values...