This is a quick-and-dirty, absolutely opinionated and very likely unfair comparison of serialization libraries in Java.
- Be able to serialize arbitrary objects
- In an efficient, binary format
- Without having to implement
Serializable - The library should have a small footprint
- Performance is not critical
Because of the above, a few well-known frameworks are instantly disqualified:
- Avro, FlatBuffers, Protobuf, Thrift: they require upfront schema design
- CBOR, Ion: looks too low-level, arbitrary object graphs are hard
- GSON, Jackson XML/JSON, Jettison, etc.: they emit text
See Samples - the library should be able to deserialize an arbitrarily complex, but reasonably sized object graph.
| Library | Dependencies | Maintained? (2023.03) | Conclusion |
|---|---|---|---|
| fst | 178 (WTF??) | yes (2022.10.31) | 💀 178 deps?? Didn't even bother |
| kryo | 3 | yes (2022.12.30) | ✅ KryoTest (and its performance is awesome!) |
| msgpack-jackson | 13 | yes (2022.06.28) | ❌ MsgPackTest (fails on polymorphic types) |