NAME
Sereal - Fast, compact, powerful binary (de-)serialization
SYNOPSIS
use Sereal qw(encode_sereal decode_sereal
sereal_encode_with_object
sereal_decode_with_object
looks_like_sereal);
# Note: For performance reasons, you should prefer the OO interface,
# or sereal_(en|de)code_with_object over the stateless
# encode_sereal/decode_sereal functions.
# See the Sereal::Performance documentation for details.DESCRIPTION
Sereal is an efficient, compact-output, binary and feature-rich serialization protocol. The Perl encoder is implemented as the Sereal::Encoder module, the Perl decoder correspondingly as Sereal::Decoder. They are distributed separately to allow for safe upgrading without downtime. (Hint: Upgrade the decoder everywhere first, then the encoder.)
This Sereal module is a very thin wrapper around both Sereal::Encoder and Sereal::Decoder. It depends on both and loads both. So if you have a user of both encoder and decoder, it is enough to depend on a particular version of Sereal and you'll get the most recent released versions of Sereal::Encoder and Sereal::Decoder whose version is smaller than or equal to the version of Sereal you depend on.
The protocol specification and many other bits of documentation can be found in the github repository. Right now, the specification is at https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/blob/master/sereal_spec.pod, there is a discussion of the design objectives in https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/blob/master/README.pod, and the output of our benchmarks can be seen at https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/wiki/Sereal-Comparison-Graphs.
EXPORTED FUNCTIONS
It is recommended to use the object-oriented interface of Sereal::Encoder and Sereal::Decoder if you care about performance. For detailed performance considerations, see Sereal::Performance.
You can optionally import five functions from Sereal. encode_sereal is the same function as Sereal::Encoder's encode_sereal function. decode_sereal and looks_like_sereal are the same as Sereal::Decoder's functions of the same names. Finally, you can import the advanced functional interface sereal_encode_with_object and sereal_decode_with_object. Again, see Sereal::Performance for information about those.
After loading the Sereal module, both Sereal::Encoder and Sereal::Decoder are guaranteed to be loaded, so you can use their object-oriented interface.
get_sereal_encoder($OPTSHASH)
Returns a Sereal::Encoder with the given options. This encoder will be shared by other calls to this function.
get_sereal_decoder($OPTSHASH)
Returns a Sereal::Decoder with the given options. This encoder will be shared by other calls to this function.
write_sereal($FILENAME,$STRUCT,$APPEND,$OPTS)
Write a sereal packet to $FILENAME. See Sereal::Encoder::write_to_file().
read_sereal($FILENAME,$OPTS)
Read a sereal packet from a file. See Sereal::Decoder::read_from_file().
BUGS, CONTACT AND SUPPORT
For reporting bugs, please use the github bug tracker at http://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/issues.
For support and discussion of Sereal, there are two Google Groups:
Announcements around Sereal (extremely low volume): https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sereal-announce
Sereal development list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/sereal-dev
AUTHOR
Steffen Mueller <smueller@cpan.org>
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This module was originally developed for Booking.com. With approval from Booking.com, this module was generalized and published on CPAN, for which the authors would like to express their gratitude.
LICENSE
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2012, 2013, 2014 by Steffen Mueller