u/AnnoyingMemer

I have spent some time recently reimplementing Mojang's DataFixerUpper library (which handles serialization and data transformation through the lifetime of a project) in C# with a few of my own takes on it. It uses literally zero reflection and rivals the built-in System.Text.Json library in allocations, sometimes even beating it (although latency is a bit of a problem right now because I'm not batching operations together), as evidenced by the benchmarks:

| Method                     | Mean     | Error    | StdDev    | Median   | Gen0   | Allocated |
|----------------------------|---------:|---------:|----------:|---------:|-------:|----------:|
| STJ_Serialize              | 237.9 ns | 24.37 ns |  71.86 ns | 194.4 ns | 0.0343 |      72 B |
| STJ_Serialize_IntArray     | 186.2 ns | 20.36 ns |  60.02 ns | 142.0 ns | 0.0191 |      40 B |
| STJ_Deserialize            | 321.7 ns |  5.65 ns |  10.19 ns | 318.4 ns | 0.0801 |     168 B |
| STJ_Deserialize_IntArray   | 198.2 ns |  2.63 ns |   2.46 ns | 197.5 ns | 0.0534 |     112 B |
| Codec_Serialize            | 546.0 ns | 59.11 ns | 174.29 ns | 418.2 ns | 0.0534 |     112 B |
| Codec_Serialize_IntArray   | 393.4 ns |  2.92 ns |   2.28 ns | 392.7 ns | 0.0610 |     128 B |
| Codec_Deserialize          | 524.7 ns |  5.14 ns |   4.29 ns | 524.2 ns | 0.0305 |      64 B |
| Codec_Deserialize_IntArray | 475.7 ns |  4.07 ns |   3.40 ns | 475.0 ns | 0.0343 |      72 B |

The library is designed in such a way that you can create tiny codecs for structs/classes and compose them together to serialize even complex/nested DTOs seamlessly. You can also define "timelines" for your objects and pass their serialized versions through transformation pipelines to add/remove/rename keys.

The library also happens to be format-agnostic by design, so the exact same APIs would work with a backend for cbor, custom binary, yaml, burping into the mic vocoded into gangsta's paradise or any other format you might think of.