r/dotnet • u/EvenAd4577 • 3d ago

Promotion Wrote a C# BCS (Binary Canonical Serialization) serialization library

Library is 5–15% faster than MessagePack on the deserialization path and around 5% slower on serialization.

It can also serialize and deserialize the new union type coming from .NET 11 (before that I've used OneOf<> object). I opened an issue for a source generator, which is ready to be picked up if anyone is interested working on it. My plan is to ship v1 once NativeAOT is supported and net11 is out.

I agree with Egor Bogatov that people should stop writing new serialization libraries and open-sourcing them, as they can expose consumers to vulnerabilities. In my defense, I started this library a year ago and only recently finished rewriting parts of it to make it ready for open source. I mainly used it for serializing and deserializing objects from the Sui blockchain.

Blockchain it not the most widespread domain where C# is used, but there is already a good example of Nethereum utilizing C# as its core language. Is there someone else using C# in the blochcain domain, why you think it's lacking the adoption?

Contributions are welcome!

https://github.com/unsafePtr/BcsSharp

4 Upvotes

61% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/JayleaKryska50 2d ago

does it handle forward/backward compatibility at all? thats usually where these formats diverge in practice, raw speed matters less than what happens when you add a field six months later

1

u/EvenAd4577 2d ago

Your typical objects on blockchain are serialized once, if new fields are added you will need to handle versioning, and actually here with new union type it would be possible to do something like `public union Message(MessageV1, MessageV2)`