Bitsery

Header only C++ binary serialization library. It is designed around the networking requirements for real-time data delivery, especially for games.

All cross-platform requirements are enforced at compile time, so serialized data do not store any meta-data information and is as small as possible.

bitsery is looking for your feedback on gitter

Features

• Cross-platform compatible.
• Optimized for speed and space.
• No code generation required: no IDL or metadata, just use your types directly.
• Runtime error checking on deserialization,- designed to be save with untrusted network data.
• Provides forward/backward compatibility for your types.
• 2-in-1 declarative control flow, same code for serialization and deserialization.
• Allows fine-grained serialization control using advanced serialization techniques like value ranges, entrophy encoding etc...
• Extendable for flows that requires different serialization and deserialization logic (e.g. pointers serialization, geometry compression, or versioning support).
• Configurable endianess support.
• No macros.

Why to use bitsery

Look at the numbers, and features list, and deside for your self. (benchmarked on Ubuntu with GCC 7.1)

	serialize	deserialize	data size	executable size
flatbuffers	1852 ms.	777 ms.	27252 bytes	74544 bytes
cereal	1069 ms.	1385 ms.	20208 bytes	72336 bytes
bitsery	808 ms.	737 ms.	14803 bytes	69784 bytes
bitsery fixed-size buffer	297 ms.	738 ms.	14803 bytes	69928 bytes
bitsery optimized serialization flow	686 ms.	997 ms.	6601 bytes	69320 bytes
bitsery optimized serialization flow + fixed-size buffer	446 ms.	996 ms.	6601 bytes	69464 bytes

If still not convinced read more in library motivation section.

How to use it

This documentation comprises these parts:

• Tutorial - getting started.
• Reference section - all the details.

Requirements

Works with C++11 compiler, no additional dependencies, include <bitsery/bitsery.h> and you're done.

Platforms

This library was tested on

• Windows: Visual Studio 2015, MinGW (gcc 5.2)
• Linux: GCC 5.4, GCC 6.2, Clang 3.9
• OS X Mavericks: AppleClang 8