miniserial 0.1.0

Simple, fast, and space-efficient (de)serialization for simple Python classes

Miniserial

Miniserial is a Python package for dead-simple, space-efficient serialization and deserialization of simple dataclasses. There are many great packages for general purpose serialization in the standard library and on PyPI (e.g. json, marshal, pickle, ujson, bson, etc.), but most use serialization formats that can come with significant byte overhead. Sometimes, project constraints—like the 256-byte-max-packet radio devices that inspired this package—encourage the use of a much more compact format, something akin to protobuf or the layout of C structs. But libraries in this space typically come with the overhead of implementing manual serializers, modifying class fields with various wrappers, or using non python data specifications (e.g. .proto files).

Miniserial makes compact serialization easy. Simply have your dataclass inherit from the Serialization mixin, and serialize and deserialize methods will be automatically generated for the class. For example:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from miniserial import Serializable

@dataclass
class Person(Serializable):
    name   : str
    age    : int
    titles : list[str]
    balance: float
    
p = Person("Bob", 34, ["Mr.", "Dr.", "Professor"], 239847.25)
assert Person.deserialize(p.serialize()) == p

Classes that inherit the Serializable mixin must be dataclasses composed of fields annotated with simple types. Postponed annotation evaluation (PEP 563) is not currently supported, so serializable classes must not be defined in a file with the import: from __future__ import annotations.

Documentation of supported types and the serialization format is on the way. For now, bool, int, float, str, and list are supported. int and float are taken to be 32 bit values. Support for more types, including int64, float64, etc. from numpy are on the horizon.