Type-Specialized Serialization with Sharing

In this paper we present an implementation of a Standard ML combinator library for serializing and deserializing data structures. The combinator library supports serialization of cyclic data structures and sharing. It generates compact serialized values, both due to sharing, but also due to type specialization. The library is type safe in the sense that a type specialized serializer can be applied only to values of the specialized type. In the paper, we demonstrate how programmer control provided by the combinator library can lead to efficient serializers compared to how values are serialized with generic serializers supported by traditional language implementations.