Comparison with devalue

[aleclarson]

Hi, could you explain the differences between this and devalue? Thanks

[lxsmnsyc]

There's a lot of serializer libraries so I didn't document any comparison to any but to answer your question, it all comes down to performance and features.

Seroval offers a lot more features when it comes to serializable values and modes (streaming and async), whereas devalue doesn't do this out-of-the-box. See https://github.com/lxsmnsyc/seroval/blob/main/docs/serialization.md and https://github.com/lxsmnsyc/seroval/blob/main/docs/compatibility.md

Perf-wise, seroval runs, at most, twice as fast as devalue, you can check the benchmarks here: https://github.com/lxsmnsyc/seroval/blob/main/benchmark/results/csv/simple-object%20to%20string.csv

There's a lot more to flesh out, but I just described the more obvious ones.

[rxliuli]

One more thing: seroval uses eval for deserialization, which cannot be used in certain environments (browser extensions, Cloudflare Workers, etc.), although it is faster. devalue supports a deserialization mode without using eval but does not support async serialization, such as Blob and other types. I am trying to implement async support for devalue because using eval is not a viable solution for my scenario.

[lxsmnsyc]

@rxliuli Seroval supports non-eval deserialization. See JSON mode.

[rxliuli]

@rxliuli Seroval supports non-eval deserialization. See JSON mode.

For some reason, I completely overlooked the JSON mode, even though I should have seen it before. I probably ignored it because I saw you mentioned its deserialization speed is very slow and not recommended... Have you compared the performance difference between JSON mode and devalue?

#44
solidjs/solid-start#1825

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I did some tests, and indeed, if you use JSON mode, performance decreases somewhat compared to using eval. I understand why it’s not used anymore. Meanwhile, devalue actually performs better in this case.

test	seroval	seroval-json	devalue
small-collection to string	266,832	159,215	208,221
simple-object to string	2,305,692	1,268,725	1,607,241
large-simple-collection to string	889	475	754
large-invalid-keys-collection to string	717	480	401
large-dedupe-collection to string	2,348	1,605	2,051
large-complex-collection to string	16,121	8,208	12,350
large-circular-collection to string	2,025	1,586	1,867
dedupe-object to string	474,230	246,212	360,122
circular-dedupe to string	280,603	138,156	216,629
circular-simple to string	821,345	650,447	703,721

[lxsmnsyc]

@rxliuli I've honestly not been able to put effort on optimizing the JSON mode because it have not been a priority. Although I might revisit it soon.

One of the biggest reasons why it is like that is because of the nature of megamorphic objects.