SKUserial

SKUserial is an open-source data serialization library designed to efficiently encode and decode structured data for use in software applications. It provides fast binary encoding with an optional human-readable text representation, allowing developers to balance payload size and readability. The library focuses on simplicity, type safety, and broad interoperability across platforms.

SKUserial offers a pluggable codec architecture that supports common primitives (numbers, strings, booleans), compound types (arrays and maps), and user-defined types through adapters or codable interfaces. It supports schema-aware encoding to enable forward and backward compatibility, as well as optional fields to preserve compatibility with evolving data models. The encoding is designed to be streaming-friendly, enabling partial parsing and incremental decoding for large payloads.

In practice, SKUserial is used for network communication, inter-process data exchange, and local storage in mobile and server environments. It emphasizes predictable performance, compact binary size, and straightforward APIs that resemble familiar encoding paradigms. The library includes tooling for benchmarking, diagnostics, and cross-language bindings to facilitate integration in projects with multi-language stacks.

SKUserial is maintained by an open-source community with a permissive license. It encourages community contributions, documentation improvements, and continuous improvement of performance and compatibility. The project repository typically hosts release notes, a compatibility matrix, and example use cases.

See also: serialization formats, binary encoding, JSON, MessagePack, Protocol Buffers.