RE: [Caml-list] serialize/deserialize

["Michael Hicks" <mwh@cs.umd.edu>]

You can always write your own serialization functions from scratch, based on
streams.  In our networking implementation written in OCaml (see
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~switchware/PLAN/), we wrote a simple package for
marshalling ints, strings, characters, etc. into our own version of streams.
These streams could then be dumped to a string (which was fast, since our
streams are represented by strings internally) and sent out as packets.  We
tuned it for speed and space a while back, so hopefully it's not too slow.
If you download the distribution at the above URL, take a look at
plan/util/marshal_prim.ml for the basic package and then look at
plan/basis/marshalling.ml to see how we used the marshalling primitives for
our application.  Note that most of this code was written before there was a
generic OCaml Buffer module, so it probably could be rewritten to use that,
but I haven't looked into it.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr
[mailto:owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr]On Behalf Of Brian Naylor
Sent: Friday, July 19, 2002 1:19 AM
To: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: [Caml-list] serialize/deserialize


I need to write my own marshalling functions for a network protocol stack.
Is
there any way I can make use of the <caml/intext.h> serialization and
deserialization functions? Has anyone trod this path before me and is
willing
to share their wisdom?

Why am I doing this, you ask? Bandwidth is critical, and custom marshalling
can
save a lot of space - especially in getting rid of headers. Also, I want to
do
things like serialize some info, add a MAC, then serialize some more. The
off-the-shelf solution is too space-inefficient:

let alen = Marshal.to_buffer buf ofs max adata [] in
let mac = Digest.substring buf ofs alen in
let blen = Marshal.to_buffer buf (ofs + alen) (max - alen) (mac, bdata) []
in
...

Thanks for any advice...

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