Why this discussion of yet another serialization format?
Pickle is stated to be unsafe. Marshal is also stated to be unsafe. XML can be bloated, and XML+gzip is quite slow. Do size,speed, and security features have to mutually exclusive? No, that possibly is why people have had to invent their own formats. I can list four off the top of my head: bencode (bittorrent) jelly (twisted) banana (twisted) tofu (soya3d, looks like it is using twisted now... hmmm) XML is simply not suitable for database appplications, real time data capture and game/entertainment applications. I'm sure other people have noticed this... or am I alone on this issue? :-) Have a look at this contrived example: import time value = (("this is a record",1,2,1000001,"(08)123123123","some more text")*10000) import gherkin t = time.clock() s = gherkin.dumps(value) print 'Gherkin encode', time.clock() - t, 'seconds' t = time.clock() gherkin.loads(s) print 'Gherkin decode', time.clock() - t, 'seconds' import xmlrpclib t = time.clock() s = xmlrpclib.dumps(value) print 'XMLRPC encode', time.clock() - t, 'seconds' t = time.clock() xmlrpclib.loads(s) print 'XMLRPC decode', time.clock() - t, 'seconds' Which produces the output:
pythonw -u "bench.py" Gherkin encode 0.120689361357 seconds Gherkin decode 0.395871262968 seconds XMLRPC encode 0.528666352847 seconds XMLRPC decode 9.01307819849 seconds